Mia Wong
Appearances
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 184
These minutes show that NHS officials were aware of every single one of these deaths. Every single one of them. People were in these meetings calling for an independent investigation into each of these deaths, into gender-affirming care for minors, into the restrictions. They wanted to investigate everything and had detailed data. They had information on the type of care they received.
Behind the Bastards
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which was basically negligence. And instead of reporting on this publicly, instead of doing an investigation, they covered this up. They didn't do anything. And they just pretended like everything was fine. Like, there was no deaths as a result of this. They were active. Nothing wrong was going on. And these meeting minutes are still public, too.
Behind the Bastards
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Morgan does not believe in that it's still on his Twitter account. Good Law Project is not fully a thing anymore. They're kind of dissolving their stuff right now, but Morgan is still keeping all his information up. It's all detailed. It's publicly there. People can see for themselves these minutes, and it's horrifying.
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 184
Well, yeah. So the cash report is probably one of the worst things to come out of the anti-trans crowd in the past decade. The gist of it is it's essentially a supposedly independent report commissioned by the Nightwing government to investigate the efficacy of puberty blockers and gender-affirming care for minors. Authored by Dr. Hilary Cass, who... they claim is an expert in this subject.
Behind the Bastards
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I'll get to that in a second. The gist of what it was claiming is that, nope, puberty blockers do anything to actually hurt the kids. They don't improve mental health. They don't protect anything. Suicides stay the same. It's all bad. Get rid of them. And actually restrict gender-affirming care, too. And also, maybe we should detransition these kids, too. It's a very long document.
Behind the Bastards
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It's actually a set of documents, but the primary one isn't incredibly long. I remember when it first... It came out last year. It's been... In the works for the better part of the last decade, most of the 2010s, it's been in the works.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't remember the exact year that it was initially commissioned, but it's been something the United Kingdom government has been waiting on for a while to take action for gender-affirming care. Now, to understand the CAST report, you've got to understand a little bit about Hillary CAST. Hillary Cass is not an expert in gender-affirming care, saying that for minors.
Behind the Bastards
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She has never treated a transgender patient in her professional practice whatsoever.
Behind the Bastards
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While she was writing it. Instead of talking with a single trans person as part of the consulting, because she didn't do it by herself. It's way too long for anyone to do it by themselves. She got a bunch of unknown advisors to help her with this, one of which is a Finnish psychiatrist who has been campaigning against transgender rights for the past 20 years. Yep.
Behind the Bastards
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But she did not have any trans people on the consulting board, not a single one. Well, of course, why would you talk to a trans person about trans healthcare? Like, that's... Yeah, why would you? Trans people don't know anything. They need to be regulated and told exactly what's best for them by people who have never even talked to them before.
Behind the Bastards
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She actually, while she was writing it, she talked to Florida healthcare officials during the Ron DeSantis administration. for information on what to do. And these officials, by the way, they weren't just leftovers from the prior governor. They were appointed by Ron DeSantis and have literally been Jews bidding. in restricting healthcare.
Behind the Bastards
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And not only did she work with them, but there's even more. She worked with numerous people who were tied to anti-trans hate groups, most notable of which is the, quote, Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine. God. They are probably one of the leading anti-trans groups right now. They are a Southern Poverty Law Center desiccate group. They're not very fun people.
Behind the Bastards
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They all have a financial interest in opposing transgender rights. Many of the people with them have been quite well-paid to oppose transgender rights in courts. There's a whole rabbit hole to get into there. The point being, she's worked with hate groups, she's worked with the Sanchez appointees, she talked to no-trans people, and she often lied. A lot.
Behind the Bastards
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When the cast first came out, I was one of the people who was working around the clock to try to be like, hey... Let's not just assume that this is immediately accurate because we should wait for independent scholars to evaluate this. There's a lot of shady stuff going on here. And wouldn't you know it, a lot of things were wrong.
Behind the Bastards
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For starters, Tess misrepresented a lot of what she did for the review. It was supposed to be a systematic review into all the literature on pubic blockers. Problem is, she left out a bunch of studies, especially more recent ones with better analogies. She, in her method to grade them, basically changed it up last minute and didn't seek peer review for it from her institution's review board.
Behind the Bastards
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She didn't seek any ethical verification on anything.
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Like, it's... It gets even worse because... As time went on, a lot of journalists, myself included, found a bunch of little factual narratives there. She was misrepresenting this study. She was interpreting that study. Lots of little information. She at one point cited a YouTube channel that is dedicated to opposing trans rights. send me the YouTube channel in her fucking citations.
Behind the Bastards
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It was a tangential citation, but the point being, the fact that she even discovered that shows her allegiances. She was in the cast review. She was trying to cast doubt on the leading medical association for trans people, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. She was like, oh no, they're actually not good. They're politically biased. I'm not though.
Behind the Bastards
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Don't worry guys, don't investigate me. Yeah. And in the time since, there's been a shit ton of medical experts coming forward opposing the cast review being like, no, the methodology is garbage. Not just journalists saying it. There have quite literally been hundreds of medical experts who have come forward to publicly oppose the cast review. These are people across a variety of fields.
Behind the Bastards
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Psychiatrists, pediatricians, endocrinologists, basically everyone you could imagine who would be relevant to the study of transgender health and minors, they have come forward against it, including most of the leading researchers in the field, including people who have actually worked with trans people in a professional capacity. Yeah, wow.
Behind the Bastards
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And this review, it's the reason the United Kingdom went on last year to ban puberty blockers in all four countries within it. They started in England, then they spread it out to Scotland, Wales, with their beauty blocker ban. And most recently, right before New Year's Day, banned it in Northern Ireland.
Behind the Bastards
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And because of this, so many clinics are now just not treating trans people, including transgender adults. There are now transgender adults not getting the care they need.
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Because of something they didn't even discuss trans adults in a meaningful capacity.
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They are claiming that puberty blockers reduce IQ using a study from, like, 2001. And a separate study on sheep. Oh my god. A separate study on fucking sheep.
Behind the Bastards
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Hey, this is Mia from the future. This was recorded in the now halcyon days of January 2025. Lots of things have changed. Basically everything everywhere has gotten worse. This is the story about the oppression of trans people in the United Kingdom. It is very bleak in many ways. The United Kingdom has gotten worse since then.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. So the whistleblowers, they literally reached out to the cast while she was writing the review. She had to be like, hey, restricting puberty blockers isn't good. And like you said, TAS did not recommend to ban puberty blockers. She called for more research into it and like some restrictions, but not an outright ban. That was not anywhere within it.
Behind the Bastards
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Even with her extremism, she's like, maybe we shouldn't restrict it. everything completely, you know, maybe we should just detransition some of the kids. But she did not advocate for a full-on ban, and she has even gone public into the media to clarify that she does not believe in a full-on ban. And yet she ignored the whistleblowers.
Behind the Bastards
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She ignored them when they came to her being like, hey, there's evidence that restricting puberty blockers is causing these deaths directly. And she didn't do anything. We don't know the specifics of that conversation. That's not public information. But you read the cast review. You're not coming away with it thinking, oh boy, she's really concerned about kids who are killing themselves.
Behind the Bastards
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You're coming away with it thinking she doesn't believe a shit and she has her own agenda.
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When I dripped this story, it was getting no coverage. No other news outlet wanted to touch it. There were actually some journalists I talked to. I'm not going to name any names, but journalists I talked to who were trying to get their editors to publish a story on these claims. And they were like, I don't think so. I think we're going to do that. It's too speculative and things like that.
Behind the Bastards
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People were actively shutting it down, especially in the British media.
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and for about a month the nhs was ignoring this and not giving public comment enter west training so you said he is the head of british health care um officially he's like fucking the head of the secretary of state for health and social care some shit like that but he's a sellout he's a labor guy you know the party that's supposed to be at least kind of left wing in some way
Behind the Bastards
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The UK Supreme Court has ruled that the definition of sex in the Equality Act of 2010 is, quote, binary and is decided by, quote, biological sex.
Behind the Bastards
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And he threw trans people under the bus the first chance he got right after TERF started pressing him for it. West Streeting, in all his awful, awful glory, looked at Mogum's thread and thought, What if I denied this? So he commissioned Professor Lewis Albee, or Albee. He is a leading suicide researcher at the University of Manchester.
Behind the Bastards
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Except, even though he's been in the field of suicide research for decades, in the past year or so, he's been cozying up to a lot of anti-trans people.
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There's a shit ton of tweets of him basically talking to TERFs, repeating the, oh, we can't have men and women sports nonsense. You can witness him going down the pipeline.
Behind the Bastards
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He's a TERF who, mind you, does not professionally really work with trans people who commit suicide. He does not discuss LGBTQ issues in his research as his primary focus. He does it for the general population.
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I haven't reviewed every single study of his, so it's probably one or two that talk about LGBTQ suicide rates, but by no means is he the guy you go to to learn about why suicide attempts and suicide rates are a thing in the LGBTQ population. West's treating was like, hey, Lewis, do you want to write a quote-unquote debunking of Mogum's Dread.
Behind the Bastards
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So, enter the, I have it up right now, the quote, Review of Suicide and Gender Dysphoria at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust Independent Report. This guy, he basically claimed that, nope, there's no data to support this. Actually, Mogum's wrong. It's the data pans it out. The data doesn't lie.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. Which is like... Which is really fucking bleak when you think about it, but... Now...
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There's a million tricks people can have with this. For starters, the data set is obviously too small to analyze fucking statistically. Makes no sense to try to do a fucking in-depth statistical analysis on what Mogg was claiming was 16 kids. That's not... You're not going to get shit out of that. That's not really the big issue with it.
Behind the Bastards
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The big issue that Mogg himself actually pointed out in the same day that this came out... Malkin pointed out that his analysis was just wrong from the start. For starters, this guy analyzed, quote, current and former patients of gender identity service. Malkin's claims weren't about that. Malkin's claims were about those who were on the waiting list.
Behind the Bastards
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Which is just nuts. Like, I need to stop here for a second. It's like, the difference between, again, on the waiting list and have finished care.
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Now, there's other problems. For one, it's kind of suspicious. So... Appleby, Applebee, however you pronounce his last name, he... I'm just going to call him Applebees because fuck him.
Behind the Bastards
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He used data directly provided by NHS England. Now, astute viewers will notice something. Malcom never claimed to access data directly given to him from NHS England. He was given data from whistleblowers.
Behind the Bastards
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Malcolm actually, in this direct, because he wrote a whole slide debunking this, debunking this, and Malcolm was like, he revealed that he actually, a month before this was published, he reached out to NHS England to be like, hey, can I have your data on this subject? I've gotten a lot of information. I want to try to corroborate it. They denied him the data. They just denied him it.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, they claimed it didn't exist, that they just didn't have it at all. And suddenly they pulled out of thin air for good old Applebee's. There's some other, I'm sure, inconsistencies. As we know, Mogham had receipts. He provided information on minutes directly from NHS meetings discussing these suicides. The minutes don't match up to the data Applebee's has.
Behind the Bastards
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Applebee's is underestimating everything. Yeah. Very recently, this has not gotten any media coverage at all. Those who have been following UK politics for a while, especially trans politics, will remember the unfortunate case of Alice Littman. She was a young trans woman who committed suicide as a result of NHS waitlists years ago. Her mother, Claire Littman,
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has been a staunch ally of trans people since. She's been one of the fewest people in the UK to be like, hey, no, I'm putting my all behind trans people. She's wonderful. She came out publicly revealing that Alice Lipman was not included in Applebee's data set, even though she should have been. She was within...
Behind the Bastards
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The years. So what this says is that Applebee's had bad data that didn't include every kid.
Behind the Bastards
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True. And there was, of course, a bunch of smaller issues you could point out with Applebee's review. But the crux of it, it's bogus. Data is a matchup. As you said, he could be falsifying it. He could have just been given bad data. We don't know. He's not sharing anything. The NHS isn't sharing anything.
Behind the Bastards
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But all we know is that there's major inconsistencies and they they're not doing shit with it. And this is where we enter everyone's favorite mainstream media, the lovely British media, specifically outlets like the BBC. Right, literally within the first 24 hours of this review coming out, they reported on it. At this point, my coverage has been there for a month.
Behind the Bastards
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Logum's claims have been out there for a month. They weren't touched. And yet, the moment someone came out with the NHS trying to be like, actually, it's false, they were rushing to report on it. Something they claimed was not newsworthy previously.
Behind the Bastards
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And mind you, Mogum's rebuttal to this review was posted publicly at this time, at the time that this media coverage was going up. At the BBC article breaking the story up. The only discussion they give to basically any issues with this is just a couple brief sentences talking about Mogum's issues with it. At the beginning, they just claimed that Morgan had profound difficulties.
Behind the Bastards
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And at the very end of the article, buried at the bottom, They gave Mogum, like, three sentences, and they left out a lot of information. Like, the minutes Mogum showed that he got from whistleblowers, the exact claims he got from whistleblowers, they just didn't report on it.
Behind the Bastards
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They gave such intense coverage to Applebee's claims in the review, and then they just flat-out ignored everything Mogum was saying, everything everyone else was saying. Now, again, I add, sure, we don't know for sure who's telling the truth, but the NHS has an incentive to lie here. Mogham doesn't. Mogham is getting his career torched, basically, because of going forward about all this.
Behind the Bastards
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And I'm not going to say that the information right now we have is definitive. That's not the problem. The problem is it's been being investigated. Any non-biased fucking NHS, any non-biased British would look at Morgan's claims and think, oh, wow, we should look into this. We should independently verify. Yeah. We should try to corroborate everything he's saying, or at least see if he's accurate.
Behind the Bastards
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I agree. And I also agree with your statement. The British media can all go fuck themselves and I hope they rob them hell. Yeah. I don't know how you can, as a journalist, someone trained to prioritize the truth and nothing but the truth, look at all this and think, hmm, there's something suspicious going on here. There's nothing that warrants further investigation.
Behind the Bastards
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Even if Malcolm's claims are false, right? Even if everything Malcolm says, he made it up. He's an influential guy. He has been covered by the media for his lawsuits with the Good Law Project countless times before. He's made national headlines there. And they don't investigate this at all. Like, yeah, they're rushing to report on everything. Fucking JK Rowling says everything.
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Some random fucking turf is saying Maya Angelou, whatever turf you want to run.
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Everything she does. And she's not even an expert in anything. She's a fucking author of children's books. Like...
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Yeah. It just gets me how they didn't report on these claims at all when they were initially made. Like, it didn't even have to be a big story. Like, most fucking outlets I've written for would have just reported as like, oh, this guy said this. We're waiting more information. Okay, whatever. It wouldn't be a good reporting, but it'd be the bare minimum. They didn't even do that.
Behind the Bastards
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They rushed to just repeat whatever the fuck a commissioned review from the government said. That's more reputable, I guess, than leading advocates who actually cited their sources instead of just throwing shit at the wall.
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Yeah, thank you for having me. I... I can primarily be found on blue sky. That is the main place I post now. Yeah. I'm at me realizing that blue sky duck social beyond that. You'll probably see one of my articles published around because I am constantly working my ass off.
Behind the Bastards
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So yeah, I first became aware of what was going on independently. I was working with Alejandra Caraballo, the clinical instructor of Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard. She's a friend of mine and we worked together on some decks. She and Ira and some other people were talking about the horrific waitlists going on with the NHS. It's terrible there. I mean, not even just for trans stuff.
Behind the Bastards
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There's probably millions of reports of people having to wait months to get essential health care. Some people have died just from their conditions being on the waitlist. We had both stumbled upon some old news reports from years prior about trans kids who had unfortunately committed suicide as a result of not getting the essential help they needed on the wait list.
Behind the Bastards
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These stories were not talked about in the media at all. They got one art mentioning what happened to them. And then that was it. So we started to investigate it. She was compiling a spreadsheet of everything she could find, every news report of kids who experienced this. I was pitching help and contribute to that spreadsheet some.
Behind the Bastards
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And then right around the same time, the director then of the Good Law Project, a civil rights organization that does a lot of legal stuff in the United Kingdom. His name is Jolyon Mogham. Apologize if I mispronounce that. He came out with a Twitter thread. Revealing, and this was very suddenly, he hadn't contacted anyone about this.
Behind the Bastards
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He just kind of posted it right when he got enough of a story and everything. He revealed that he was talking to a couple whistleblowers within the NHS about what was going down. And not only did he talk to some whistleblowers, but he also gained some independent evidence from himself, his own investigation, from meeting minutes from officials in the NHS.
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And so what he found kind of began with the first whistleblower. This one was someone who did not reveal much about who they were publicly, presumably to protect their job. But Malcom said that with his whistleblowers, he independently confirmed that they did work for the NHS. He saw their IDs. Malcom's not the type of guy to lie. He's a trusted figure in the UK political scene.
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First one said that there was only one reported suicide prior to 2020. Significance of 2020 in relation to trans healthcare at Night Kingdom is was that the infamous case Bell v. Tattestock.
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I'm not going to go into detail of this case because it's convoluted and messy and hellish, but the gist of it is that it led to tightened restrictions on gender reform and care for minors, particularly in the realm of puberty lovers. This ruling ended up kind of restricting how it might act as puberty blockers some. It was later overturned, but it already led to lasting damage.
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Even after it was overturned, a lot of doctors were hesitant to even prescribe puberty blockers because they were worried about political consequences. So a lot of minors weren't getting the care they need.
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Yeah, and they use complete bogus justifications for this. They're like, we don't see any benefits of puberty blockers. And it's like, the point is not that they are benefiting these kids directly. No kid is like, oh boy, I get to be five years behind on puberty for my peers. I get to look like a 10-year-old while all my peers have full-on been everything. Oh boy. Like, no, the point is that
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These kids are being deprived of the care they absolutely need to stay alive. And it's being targeted just for the sole purpose of getting cheap political from what are the hells in office.
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But more back to the whistleblowers. So prior to 2020, when the Bellevue Tavistock ruling came into effect, only one transmitter died from suicide. I don't quite remember the time frame they used to estimate it, but it was broader than the one they used after. I believe it was like seven years, I think.
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And the years after, which was measured up to like the very beginning of 2024, like January 2024. So not even four years, more like three years and two months. They've recorded 16 deaths. Yeah. 16 transgender minors committed suicide. And they were all able to be linked to restrictions on community borders and NHS waitlists. This whistleblower says...
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This data came directly from a doctor who analyzed this stuff professionally as part of his job in the NHS. The doctor also wanted to be anonymous, understandably. He named himself the, quote, named doctor for safeguarding children. He tried to warn people in the NHS about this. He was like, hey, there's something wrong. This isn't right. We are fucking up.
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And he talked to so many different people, including Dr. Hillary Cass, who I'll talk a bit about later.
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Giant ominous music surrounding her name. He just warned of the people, basically. And they all ignored him. They all just, according to him, and this is all alleged, I have to say, you know, this has not been verified in the court of law or anything. This is according to the whistleblowers among them, but we have no reason to believe they lied or fabricated this.
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Information about this was not even revealed publicly. There's no public outcry. There was no action taken by the NHS or any of these clinics. So that is the first whistleblower and the whistleblower's connection to that doctor. The second one basically came and gave independent verification of this. They were like, yeah, I've seen the data for myself too. I can confirm this is legitimate.
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Now, it wasn't just these three staff members who were trying to raise alarm bells. According to the second whistleblower, staff in the NHS were like, hey, whoa, this is not cool. We need to do something. And so they got an open letter, sent it to their higher-ups,
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And reportedly, the director of the Tavistock Clinic, which was at the time the only gender-affirming care clinic for minors in the entire United Kingdom. Since that is more opened up, but it's a really complicated thing that's a headache to deal with. But head honchos at Tavistock completely retaliated. They threatened them with disciplinary action. They suppressed material.
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Yeah, absolutely. So the budget bill, also known as House Resolution 101, is this year's reconciliation bill, which is Congress basically deciding next year's budget and how they're going to allocate all their funds. This time around, Republicans decided it would be a great idea to push through.
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So what it was at first was a intense limitation on what Medicaid cover, essentially just humongous Medicaid cuts. And this is what I began investigating first. Me and Maddie were talking about it a bunch. She's the one who took me off to it.
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They started off by implementing huge cuts to Medicaid that would result in millions of people losing access to their health care, not even just trans people. Shortly after they announced these cuts, for instance, ADAPT, a group of disabled activists, they are famous for being the ones who climbed up the steps of the... I believe it was the Capitol building in the 90s to...
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raise awareness and help get the American Disabilities Act passed. They staged a protest on the United States Capitol during a hearing for this bill where Republicans were just talking about it and praising themselves. Multiple activists got arrested. They're all fine now, apparently. Apparently they weren't treated too bad either, which is good to hear.
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But what ultimately happened is more and more came out and it came revealed that Not only would disabled people be affected, but basically every marginalized group. Poor people, of course, being what we were focusing on, given the beat. But this will impact essentially everyone, especially if you're low income, especially if you are a person of color, you are more likely to be impacted.
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just by virtue of this bill and how sweeping it is. And Republicans implemented a ban for gender-affirming care for minors on it. It was a very milquetoast ban that at the time was projected to pretty much get overturned in court right away if we were to pass. They didn't stop there, though.
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They quickly evolved it, and they tried to implement it into a sweeping ban on gender-affirming care for all ages on Medicaid and for any health insurance received through Affordable Care Act marketplaces. And ultimately, this led to a lot of panic and a lot of people assuming that their care was going to be taken away immediately. That wasn't what was going to happen.
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The minimum effective date that's currently in the bill is 2027. I'm telling people to prepare if it passes for 2026 because there's a decent chance Republicans will try to expedite it because it passed through the House. It passed through committees in the House. It was sent to the Senate. And I think that's what we'll give to Maddie to talk about kind of what next steps for that are.
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They basically were like... You go public about this. If you continue talking about this, you're going to face consequences.
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Yeah. So in addition to reaching out to your senators, of course, do that. There's an email template. Maddie wrote up a great one. It tells you everything you need to do. You can even leave a phone call to script. It takes like five minutes. But more long term is this is not going to be the only attack on gender affirming care. It's not going to stop here.
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This is just the latest attempt that they're trying to do. Ultimately, we cannot rely on the government to give us essential health care. We cannot rely on the government to protect us and give us what we need, because fundamentally, the government and the laws that it aims to uphold are about protecting the rich, protecting the powerful, protecting the wealthy.
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The law is functionally something that gives police power to act as essentially an occupying army. on the state and to persecute anyone who deviates from what those who are disproportionately rich and powerful decree. And we need to start focusing on building long-term solutions.
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Everything we can do with legislative activism is important, but ultimately it will not save us because there will be more attacks down the line. They'll keep coming and they only need to win once. We need to welcome that every time. But There are long-term solutions. My beat at this point is essentially just telling everyone to get plugged into your local mutual aid network.
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Get plugged into people doing work on the ground, in your state, in your area, who are focusing on a plethora of different issues. Bit of a self-plug here, but I wrote an article, for instance, last month where I interviewed a seasoned activist in the Twin Cities. who told me just a lot about the history of
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Radical praxis in the cities, especially in light of the George Floyd riots, and especially in light of corporate pride, franco-capitalism, whole nine yards. Recommend reading it. It's on thefreeradical.org. Check it out.
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But beyond, of course, my own writing and my own interviews, there are so many people doing work that doesn't get covered because it either isn't palatable to mainstream news audiences or... It is seeking coverage for a variety of reasons. In every single major city, this I can guarantee, there are people doing the work. Most of the time, it's not going to be publicly visible, but they are there.
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I would recommend that everyone who is not currently plugged in get started with something that is much more entry-level and something that is much more like... Meant to be kind of for everyone who may not be willing to do more in-depth and more crazy type of stuff. Food Not Bombs is the great thing I recommend for everyone to check out. Not every city has one. Most do. Every state has one.
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Beyond that, there are plenty of local mutual aid groups in every single locality. And if there's not one directly by you, there's probably one in your nearest major city. I would specifically recommend...
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I'm a bit biased here, but I would recommend focusing on ones that are decentralized and non-hierarchical, ones that don't revolve around centralizing power and placing that power in the hands of people who are either good at smooth talking or who have a lot of money.
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Ultimately, the way forward for people of all different marginalized groups, not even just trans people, you know, undocumented immigrants, black and indigenous people of color, low-income people, disabled people, and so forth, the way forward is by recognizing that our issues affect all of us. Attacks on trans healthcare are not limited there.
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Inevitably, let's say they ban trans healthcare overnight. They're going to come for intersex people next. They're going to come for gay people next. They're going to come for everyone. So I would just say, get involved in your local groups and reach out. There are resources out there. If you need some, check out thefreeradical.org. I recommend a ton of them.
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Yeah, thank you so much for that. I want to close on... I want to read a line from fucking Namek's manifesto from Andor.
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Yeah, I was the first one who broke the story. I basically reported on it almost immediately after Maldon went public about this because I knew not many people were going to report on this right away, and it was going to kind of be a headache. I didn't know how few would, but I was the first one to report on it.
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I did it for journalist Aaron Reid, Subsec Aaron in the Morning, back in June of last year. And I had to stop writing it multiple times. I spent the entire day working on it because it was stomach-wrenching, reading some of these stories and doing everything.
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The only reason I even got through it was because I dissociated the entire time and just kind of compartmentalized the anger a bunch because it's like, Jesus Christ, this is horrifying. But Malkin was not talking out of his ass with this, too. He brought receipts. Right in the initial thread, he...
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showed leaked meeting minutes and like you can see watermarks from the nhs on these meeting minutes like it is unless someone wants to suggest that he did a giant conspiracy and fabricated a bunch of very accurate meeting minutes that reflect publicly available meeting minutes elsewhere it it's pretty reputable yeah
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about bad things. Usually, I don't know, this is mostly a bad things episode. I am your host, Mia Wong, and one of the kind of things we've emphasized in the show a lot is that a lot of the structure of the kind of open fascism that we're seeing now is stuff that was put in place under...
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liberal administrations and its practices that are carried out by Democrats. And one of the biggest ones of those, and this is something that I think you can trace the violence here and you can trace the politics that inspired directly to how we got to Trump being in power is the just continuous crisis in the U.S. of governments doing sweeps of encampments of unhoused people.
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And to talk about really one of the most horrifying things that happens regularly in a country of just unhinged and hideous horror is Emma, who does advocacy work for unhoused and disabled people in Alameda County, and Satya, who does support drink sweeps in Oakland when, yeah, this fucking unhinged shit happens. So both of you two, welcome to the show.
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Yeah. I always want to say that I'm excited and like it is true. However, I wish I read a podcast that was about like good things so that I could talk to people. It wasn't like it wasn't me being like, yeah, I'm excited to talk about like the worst thing that's happened.
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So I think a place to start on this is when we talk about what a sweep actually is on a physical level of what happens, because I think people really don't have a sense of that.
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Yeah, so to just make this clear, the thing that they're doing is they show up and they fucking destroy all your property.
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like the thing that it most closely resembles is like, we're doing our own miniature ethnic cleansings. Like that's just like what that is. Yeah.
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Yeah, this is a national discourse. You hear this all the time. You know, I think a lot of it kind of is concentrated in the most unhinged, like, tech sectors in the Bay. But, like, you hear, like, for sure, like, Elon Musk has talked about, like, oh, there's, like, a homeless industrial complex. And, like, all of these people are just, like, they want to live on the street.
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And, like, they're, like, turning down houses all the time. And it's just, like, it's so completely unmoored from reality. But...
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Yes. Unfortunately we need to take an ad break. I don't, I don't have a good transition here. I don't know, we'll move from one set of horrors to a slightly different set of horrors and come back to the first set of horrors.
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Let's run the second ad break and then we will come back. More ads. I don't know. Buy them? We are back. Let's talk about what the city's policies are supposed to be versus what they're actually doing on the ground.
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I think we can take this here towards something I think would probably be good to start closing on, which is what can people actually do about this?
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Yeah, and the rest of their policy is absolutely 100% evidence that if the state doesn't want to follow the law, it isn't real. But that also means that if they can't enforce a law, it also effectively ceases to exist. That's just the sort of balance of forces here.
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Yeah, I guess, do you have anything else that you want to make sure that you get in before we close this out?
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Hell yeah. This has been It Could Happen Here. Go loiter on street corners and make the state's life miserable until it cannot do the things it is doing right now.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast trying to figure out why some of the most powerful people in the world want everyone to think that they're gamers. It is your host, me, along with me is Garrison Davis. Hi, I've played a video game before.
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Many, I have played too many, simply too many video games. So, okay... This is in some ways kind of a lighter episode because Jesus fucking Christ, everything's really depressing. Is something going on out there? It's all really bad. And one of the people who's been making everything really, really bad is Elon Musk, who has somehow managed to like piss off the gamers. The PayPal guy?
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That's reasonable. Those are fine games. Oh, and Sonic. Oh, God. Okay. Pushing aside the subject of Sonic. So, okay. I want to take a look a bit about why this sort of matters and why all of these fucking really rich assholes are sort of trying to pretend to be gamers. And I think the place to start here is with the fact that gaming is in a $184.3 billion industry.
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Todd Harris, who is an extremely annoying guy but is also right, points out that this is more money than TV, movies, and music combined. So this is the largest entertainment market in the world by such an astounding margin in terms of just dollar value, right? Something like 3 billion people play video games.
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It's mostly mobile games, which makes the story I'm about to tell very weird because the actual people who play these games, again, it's a lot of mobile games. And it's also mostly people who are women and non-white. And yet, however, comma, when people think about, like, the gamer TM, you are not thinking about that. Yeah, like, as a political class... Yeah. Yeah.
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You know, like when people say the word gamer, yeah, you're thinking of a bunch of weird incel right wing dipshits who are white and suck ass. And this is in large part because Gamergate was sort of the first like truly effective political mobilization of like the gamer as a political identity. And obviously this is, you know, this is a fascist movement.
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Now, part of the reason this works, and we're going to be getting more into why this sort of works later, but part of the reason this works is that this is an extremely large group of people.
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Because it's new, no one has sort of defined it as a political identity before, and it's also filled with people who are extremely insecure about their identity as a gamer because this is a relatively new medium, which is why everyone fucking either wants their games to be, like, treated like movies or some shit, or they want it to be sports.
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Because those are sort of cultural things with enormous amounts of money and then that are taken like quote unquote more seriously. Yeah. Yeah. And so the effect of this is that the cultural affect of being a gamer is extremely important to these people. And this is true, actually, really both on the left as much as it is on the right. There are a lot of like sort of political figures.
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I don't know. You're sort of like online people who come out of gaming, like H-Bomber guy, I guess is an example, like Hassan to some extent. There's just like a lot of people who are like gamers. And then they sort of like,
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become political but on the other hand gaming has always been like a not always but has traditionally been an extremely right-wing space oh god garrison i feel like you will actually appreciate how fucking shit this is have i told you the story about kebab the german no oh boy okay so back in the dawn of time i played a lot of hearthstone as a kid and i was like i wasn't like good is that like a resource management type game for like gay autistic people i
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No, this is the World of Warcraft card game. Okay, that's even more embarrassing. Yeah, really bad, really bad. I think I peaked at, like, 2K Legend North America, which, like, technically speaking is, like, top, like, half a percent of players in the world.
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Oh, yeah, yeah. But 2K Legend NA is, like, fucking shitter ranks. It's bad. I was never, like, good, good at it. I was just, like, Okay. Kind of. But, you know, this is, like, a thing that I did growing up. And something I remember is, like, all of the fucking Hearthstone streamers, and these were, like, really big streamers, would play music from this guy they called Kebab the German.
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And it turns out that his actual name was Remove Kebab because he was a fucking German neo-Nazi. Well, many such cases. Yeah, for people who are not aware of mid-2010s German fascism, Remove Kebab is a slogan calling for the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Turkish people in Germany. So, great stuff, great stuff.
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This was just sort of like the water you were swimming in if you were a gamer in the 2010s. Now, this goes some way to explaining something that I noticed kind of recently, which is the absolutely bizarre obsession. These tech CEOs like who want to be thought of as gamers. And so the two examples we're going to look at are Sam Bankman Freed.
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And this is this is really technically on both sides of political spectrum. Right. We're going to look at Sam Bankman Freed and we're going to look at Elon Musk, our new overlord, I guess. So we're going to start with Sam Bankman Freed. And, you know, as we go through what's happening here, we're going to sort of unravel why it's so important to them to be seen as gamers.
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And I guess it is important to know, like, Sam Bankman Freed, like, is, I guess, like, he is a gamer in the sense that, like, he's, like, addicted to video games effectively and just plays them fucking literally constantly. Yeah, he looks the part, too.
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Yeah, yeah. Before he was put in prison for 25 years for fraud. Well, probably not anymore. He's probably going to get pardoned.
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So, okay, think about Sam Magenfried. For people who have forgotten who SBF is, he is the guy who was the founder of FTX, which was like a crypto exchange that was actually effectively a giant scam where he took everyone's money and bet it on the stock market and lost it.
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And, you know, Robert did a sort of behind-the-basters on him, and one of the things that happens constantly is that he's just, like, always fucking playing video games. He's playing this really dogshit game called Storybrick Virology Meetings.
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He is a League of Legends addict, which is, like, as any gamer will know, a person who plays League of Legends all the time, like, one of the worst categories of people who's ever existed. And one of the things that SBF did as a sort of PR thing, right, was let the author Michael Lewis of... The Big Short. We're going to get to Moneyball in a second. Blindside. Other books.
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Reputable financial advice books is what I'm hearing.
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But, you know, like, our very, very powerful, influential, and, like, wealthy American journalists just let him sort of tag along and... And Michael Lewis's sort of angle on understanding him, and this is something that, like, SBF was, like, you know, was, like, projecting, right, in order for this to be the image of him, was him as, like, the gamer.
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And this sort of just, like, baffles Michael Lewis, right? Because he just, like, doesn't understand someone who just has ADHD and plays video games all the time and doesn't give a shit, so he plays video games during meetings. Like, no one has ever been like this. I have no idea what you mean. I actually don't play video games during meetings because it is too obvious.
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This is the one part about Sam Bacon Free that's relatable to me. I play so many video games. It is my, like, anti-depression strategy, basically. Like, when I need to not think for a while, there's just me playing. Actually, Path of Exile 2, one of the games that we're going to be fucking talking about today. Something that I play a lot of. I've done so much fucking gaming, like...
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God, I used to play this game called Smite, which is like a, it's like a MOBA, like League of Legends, but like third person. And I played so much Smite that there were pros showing up at my casual games. When the Zuma revolution comes and they execute the gamers and they execute me, I'm going to be like, yeah, you know, that's reasonable. Like, can't argue with that.
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But, you know, so what happens with this sort of thing is that Michael Lewis's image of SPF becomes, as this gamer who's doing these completely incomprehensible things, whose mind must be so unbelievably brilliant. Yeah, totally. Because he's just, like, playing fucking video games all the time. And this gets to one of the aspects of why these people do...
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this sort of, like, pretending to be a gamer thing. And, like, SPF, like, is a gamer, right? But, like, why they make us part of their cultural image, which is that a lot of the traditional media people, even though gaming is an enormous industry, it's extremely profitable, and is enormously culturally powerful, it doesn't have...
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the same kind of critical culture around it doesn't exist that you would see for something like movies.
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Because like part of it not being respectable is that someone like Michael Lewis, right, who was like as establishment of a journalist as there's ever been. These people don't play video games. They're one of the few groups of people who just like don't game are these like traditional mainstream sort of access journalists. Right.
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And so they run into this shit and they have no fucking idea what the hell is going on. And it's just really, really easy to sort of bamboozle them by just doing something that any gamer... You show a gamer a League of Legends addict, and they will instantly be able to just read this person a fucking book. Also, by the way, gaming addiction is like... kind of a fake thing.
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I'm like mostly joking here, but also like League of Legends makes you a worse person. It simply does. You just get mad all the time. I know too many League of Legends players in my goddamn life. Holy shit. Terrible game. Yeah, but arcane though, right? All right. Continue. Oh, God.
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Okay, we're going to take an ad break and then when I come back, I'm going to explain part of why this worked, which is the unique incompetence of Michael Lewis. Well, I look forward to that.
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So we are back now. OK, obviously, part of the reason this works, too, is, you know, as I've been talking about, right, like these these really out of touch sort of like mainstream journalists who just don't understand an enormous market. Right. But Lewis is in some sense kind of a special case because he is really, truly an unbelievably gullible dumbass.
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And to get an understanding of this, I'm going to go into something that Lewis, in theory, understands a lot better, which is sports. So Lewis has written two of the most famous books ever written about sports, right? He wrote Moneyball, which is the book that we're going to be talking about, which we'll get to in a second.
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And he wrote The Blind Side, which is another book that they talk about on Behind the Bastards. You can go listen to that. But I want to... Go in on Moneyball. Moneyball is supposed to be this book about how this underdog Oakland Athletics team invented, like, baseball metrics.
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And they used sabermetrics to, like, build this roster out of nothing that, like, went to the playoffs and did really well. And, like, I'm not going to get into the extent to which this was kind of a mirage about that Oakland A's team. Like, whatever. I'm not going to argue about baseball statistics.
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What I will argue about is that one of the characters in this fucking book, right, who's one of the sort of like underdog geniuses that like Michael Lewis loves to find, right, is this guy named Paul Podesta. He is like one of the main figures in this book. He's kind of like an assistant coach, basically. What baseball team is this?
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Oh, this is the Oakland Athletics, or now the Las Vegas Athletics or some shit. I don't know. They moved to Vegas. I don't know what they're called now. They're called the Athletics now? No, no. They were originally called the Athletics. I don't know what they're called now. They've always been the... Well, everyone just calls them the Oakland A's.
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They've been the A's forever, but yeah, they've also been stolen. Las Vegas has now stolen both the football team and the baseball team of Oakland.
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Yeah, so, okay, unfortunately, we're going to be talking about football here. Bummer. So, this guy, right, Paul Podesta, is like one of these sort of geniuses. He later goes on to be... It's kind of unclear exactly what he was doing in the organization, but he is hired by the just absolutely wretched... the football franchise, the Cleveland Browns.
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Now, to get an understanding of how wretched the Cleveland Browns are, my opening statement for him on the Browns is it is genuinely unclear how responsible Paul Podesta is for the Browns over the course of two seasons going 1-31. which is a feat of just absolutely sucking shit that is unrivaled in any other major American sports.
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I think until the fucking moon crashes into the earth, no one is going to fucking go 1-31 in 2x2 seasons of football again. So again, that is a 1-15 season followed by an 0-16 season. It's the second 0-16 season ever. Unclear how responsible for this he is. But what he is responsible for is the Sean Watson trade. Okay, it's like, Mia, why the fuck are you talking about this?
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Parts of this is also like, these people are just evil. Deshaun Watson is a serial sexual predator. I couldn't get an accurate estimate of how many women, specifically massage therapists mostly, have accused him of sexual assault. He is like one of the worst people in the entire NFL, which is a league of a lot of people who absolutely fucking suck shit.
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So that's the first thing you have to understand about Watson, is that he is just really fucking, like, morally reprehensible, right? He is, like, a bad enough sexual predator that the NFL actually fucking suspended him for a season.
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And Paul Podesta, who, again, is the guy who Michael Lewis is supposed to be, like, touting as, like, this genius analytics guy, decides that he is going to set up this deal for his team to trade for Deshaun Watson, who'd been on the Texans, and again, like... Garrison, imagine how evil you have to be for the Houston Texans to trade you on fucking moral grounds.
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That's all you need to know about this. And they traded this guy.
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And Paul Podesta orchestrates this trade that is three, it is the worst trade in the history of football. It is three first round picks, two thirds, two third round picks, and a fourth round pick. And they hand this guy, who again, I kind of emphasize this enough, is a serial sexual predator, right?
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They hand him 230 million guaranteed dollars, the largest guaranteed salary in the history of the NFL, right? So, okay, so how does Deshaun Watson, like, again, this guy who's being held up by the guy who, like, is now laundering being a gamer as, like, the great symbol of sort of, like, cultural, like, being a rogue outsider, right?
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How does Deshaun Watson, his, like, greatest fucking project do on the field? So in his first season, he basically got injured immediately. In his second season, in weeks one through five, out of 759 quarterbacks since the year 2000, just to start weeks one through five, out of, again, 759 quarterbacks, he ranks 753 out of 759 EPA for dropback. 753 out of 759.
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They traded three first round picks for this guy. He has a mind-boggling EPA of negative 0.3, which means every time the serial sexual predator drops back to make a pass, they are expected to get 0.3 less points than an average team would.
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Don't worry, we're almost done with the sports part of it. I promise there is actually a reason why I'm doing this. Which is the argument that sports and gaming actually serve very, very similar cultural roles for the right. Yeah, of course. Yes. I understand that. I can see that. Yes. Also, I've always wanted to fucking complain about this on air.
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This is the best fucking chance I'm ever going to get. So, Jesus fucking Christ.
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Yes, it is. It is absolutely what you sound like. So this guy is like a generationally awful quarterback. They sign away basically the entire future of this team, hand this guy who is a serial sexual predator $230 million, and this is the guy that fucking Michael Lewis expects you to think is like a fucking analytics genius.
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And this all comes back to, again, like, you know, the sort of mythology, the basic mythology of the nerd is that they're like picked on like by the jock or whatever, right? That's like the fundamental base of their mythology, that they're like oppressed by this. But like,
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it's just, like, the same masculinity bullshit all the way down, and you can watch, like, just, like, the worst people in fucking history just trick literally exactly the same people into thinking that they're fucking geniuses by using both of these fucking affects.
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So, I want to read something, you know, in looking at the way that this stuff functions, the way that gaming functions, like, specifically in the culture, and, you know, why these people choose to use gaming as, like, you know, as this sort of affect they're trying to project into the world. I want to read something by a friend of the show, Vicky Osterweil, in a piece called Game Boys.
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Video games also emerge at a time when technology facilitates an increasingly administered life, in which alienation and isolation feel like a prerequisite to social engagement. Consumer choice is a form of control, and unbounded economic competition produces widespread anxiety.
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To structure as pleasurable the repetition, learning, and boredom that one once mastered to live under current economic conditions, Games rely on affects, moods, and ideas that are capable of producing not only forms of violence directed towards non-normative groups, but also forms of intimacy, fantasy, and play that point towards a horizon outside of capital's clutches.
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Games provide different compensations for people who are differently situated in the social hierarchy. They give white men aggrandizing power and vengeance fantasies that modulate their sense of self-importance under conditions that disempower them. But they are also capable of giving everyone else the fantasy of an alternative to white supremacist patriarchal capitalism.
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This has been particularly clear in how queer creators, writers, and fans have found space in and around games, despite the organized harassment campaigns, intensely misogynist industry advertising campaigns, and widespread critical and cultural degradation of games that aren't played by cis men.
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So, I think the important thing here, and this is something important to remember both for Sembep and Freed, and also for the construction of right-wing gaming movements in general, and for what we're going to talk about with Elon Musk, is that Gaming is contested ground, right? As much as we think of gamers as like right wingers, right?
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There are a lot of what you would call traditionally sort of left-leaning demographics that play video games and have made spaces here because as much as they are in some ways like this force of discipline that like is something that you learn the kinds of like ability to tolerate boredom and repetition and things like that.
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that you know you use for fucking work they're also a a thing that people use to like escape the fucking hell world totally and like i mean i know this right like i am fucking like i'm a chinese trans woman who better he's better at video games and both the people i'm gonna be fucking talking about in this story right like well i i heard i heard his path of exile character was actually quite advanced but oh we're gonna we're gonna talk about the path of exile character fucking next
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But it's worth mentioning speedrunning, which is a very, very trans genre. Competitive gaming in general, competitive fighting games. Yeah, it depends a lot on the genre. Competitive fighting games like Melee. I'm going to briefly mention SonicFox, who is a black non-binary furry who's one of the greatest fighting game players of all time. Incredibly beloved character.
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The only person in history ever to beat someone 13 to 0 and a first to 11. Absolute legend, right? But, you know, these are the people that these sort of like fascist adjacent people are trying to drive out so they can use gaming as a sort of cultural force. And this functions both in gaming and also fucking in real life right now that these people are in power. And you know who else is in power?
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It's the products and services that support this podcast.
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We are back. Now, obviously, the other part of this, you know, we've talked mostly sort of about racial politics, but there's an incredible sort of gender politics in gaming. And, you know, the thing about gaming, right, is that it is to some extent a tool... that people use to cope with, like, you know, the realization of the violence of the gender system.
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And, like, I am also doing this as much as the fucking weird white guy Nazi, like, gamer dipshit, right?
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Mm-hmm. but you know what the problem with what's happening here right is that like the right that we're experiencing violence in different ways but it's like systemic violence from the gender system that is the same system but these people's solution to is to blame it on women right
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And this is, you know, I had a conversation with Vicky about this, where a lot of this stuff is sort of drawn from. And, like, I would compare it to, like, you know, lots and lots of people deal with social isolation, right, and deal with this violence. But, like, you know, on the other hand, most of us don't become mass shooters. Most, most, yeah, I would say that's true. Yeah, right.
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And so we can look at the structural forces that produces people and also just go like, fuck them. Like, eat shit.
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Yeah, yeah. But also a lot of times these people aren't fucking, like, they're not dealing with shit at all, mostly, right? I mean, like, yeah, like, okay, like, Elon Musk's weird insecurity is to some extent because of the gender system, right? But, like, also, he's the richest man in the world. He's the most powerful man alive. He's one of the most powerful people who has ever lived.
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And he still has the same sense of, like, aggrievement that powers all these people. And this is, like, one of the key things of, like, the gamer mythos, right? Is that these people constantly believe that they're being oppressed by, like, jocks or whatever. And now it's been shifted into this. Not anymore. Yeah, now they believe that they're being oppressed by, like, fucking women and minorities.
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But it's this affect, it's this feeling they have of them being the ones who are oppressed that made them into the shock troopers that we saw with Gamergate. If you're going to read one Vicky Oswald thing, and I'm citing her a lot because I think she's done a lot of the best critical reporting on video games, which is a field that I feel like we just haven't done much critical shit with.
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I mean, there's been lots of stuff about working conditions in the games industry, which are fucking terrible, and it's good, but as a medium, there hasn't been any way near as much critical engagement with it as there's been with film or music.
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But if you're going to read one thing from her, read a piece called Goon Squad, which is about the sort of fascist reaction to the really broken state of Cyberpunk 2077 when it came out. And one of the arguments that she makes is that these gamers are literally being used as scabs and pinkertons against people who make video games. And this expands out to workers more broadly.
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They're literally being used to silence anyone who talks about the problems with this game. When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, it was literally giving people seizures because it had just fucking strobing flashes and bullshit in it that they didn't warn anyone about because it was...
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broken shitty game and you know they're also used for just like anti-queer and like anti-feminist harassment campaigns and that's that's how they're sort of mobilized in real life too and and that gives you an insight into why these people sort of like do this signaling right is that they're also like signaling to their base that like i am one of you etc etc like you should fucking support me for this shit
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Now, pivoting a little bit. So when I was first talking about this episode, I kept on accidentally saying Sam Altman instead of Sam Bankman Freed because like... Yeah, many such cases. Yeah, like the last fucking white boy scammer named Sam has been replaced by an additional subsequent white boy scammer named Sam.
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And it turns out, though, I looked up Sam Altman and he has also been doing this like gamer stick thing. Totally. Like specifically in interviews with Elon Musk. Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. They're both fucking doing it now. And this brings us to the man who has spent the most time publicly lying about fucking video games recently, which is Elon Musk.
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And Elon Musk is, like, not really a gamer, I would say.
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Yeah, the richest man in the world, richest man who has ever lived. But he is really obsessed with everyone thinking that he is an elite video game player in multiple games. He's obsessed with this.
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One of his Path of Exile 2 characters, I didn't put it in the script because it's actually not the one we're going to talk about, but one of his characters in that game was named Kekias Maximus. So this is the level of mind.
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Yeah. Oops. So Elon Musk has been lying about being good at video games. And the preface to everything we're going to get to is that he has actually, he's like for a long time been doing a like, I'm a gamer thing. So his kind of problems, and I think really the origin of the weird paying people to make him look like he's good at video games thing that we're going to get to in a second is
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This is something that BlueSkyUserGayDog reminded me of, because I'd forgot... He has so many gaming scandals, I'd forgotten about this one. Which is that he, at one point, posted his build for the hit game Elden Ring, which is a very difficult game. And he had two different shields equipped, which makes literally no sense. It's, like, over-encumbered. Like, it's...
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OK, like the best explanation I've tried to figure out for like how bad at this game he is, is that posting this build on Twitter is the video game equivalent of going like, hey, look at my fucking sports car and stepping into like the shittiest car you've ever seen and then like slamming the accelerator with the parking brake on. Hey, I love the Mazda Miata.
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Like, that's like the gaming equivalent. Everyone who looked at it immediately was like, this is the dumbest man who has ever lived. This man has no idea what the fuck he is doing. He is just like, unable to understand basic fundamental systems about this game. Like, just baffling, incomprehensible bullshit. And this was like kind of a scandal for him.
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It wasn't like a huge one, but like, especially like this is one that sort of broke onto the left a lot and people were giving him shit about it. So the next time he wanted to brag about having been good at video games, he very clearly like paid someone else to like accomplish some stuff in this game called Diablo 4.
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I'm not gonna talk about Diablo stuff much because I'm a Path of Exile player, not a Diablo player. Diablo and Path of Exile are like very much the same kind of game, basically. Like you click somewhere and your character goes there and you click other things and it does attacks.
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but famously like this year he pretended to be one of like the the best path of exile 2 players in the world and he was doing this on his alt account which is has the handle it's cyber gamer 420 but the all the e's are threes so it's c y b 3 r g a m 3 r 420 wait wait wait say say say that again It's at CYB3RGAM3R420.
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So, okay. He claims to have one of the best characters in hardcore, which is a mode of Path of Exile, where if you die once, you get kicked out of it. So it's very hard. To prove that he actually did this... He, like, does a livestream where he tries to play Path of Exile, like, on a Twitter livestream. And it is immediately obvious that, like, he has no idea what he's doing.
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Like, it's not just obvious to people who play the game. I hadn't played Path of Exile 2 at this point, right? I had only played the original one, like, a decade ago. Like, a little bit of it. And I took one look at what he was doing and immediately was like, this guy has never played this game before. Like, has no idea what he's fucking doing. Like, it was so unbelievably obvious.
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Like, he, like, walked past one of the most valuable currencies in the game, just, like, walked past it, didn't notice it. It's, like, staggeringly obvious to anyone who plays video games. This guy has no idea what the fuck he's doing. And this actually explodes on him.
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And eventually he's forced to reveal that he paid someone to level his Path of Exile 2 account, and then he claims that he never claimed that it was his Path of Exile 2 account. And this, Jenny Wiley, has been a real problem for him because it pissed off the entire gaming scene.
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So you have videos with millions of views from guys like Asmogold, who is a very famous right-wing streamer who sucks ass, is a turbo right-winger, spends his time screaming about how black people in video games is DEI and woke and how it's destroying the video game industry. And fucking Asmogold is watching this video and being like, this guy is a lying piece of shit, what the fuck?
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And, like, everyone fucking reacts like this. It's genuinely wild. I've never actually seen people, like, react to this, to, like, to Elon like this. And, like, again, this is his allies on the right taking one look at this and being like, wait, this guy's just, like, lying.
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Now, what's interesting about this to some extent is that, like, again, his whole thing here is he's trying to, like, pretend that he's, like, a pro gamer or whatever, but his affect is still largely targeted towards non-gamers in the sense that, like, there's no way... I mean, okay, I guess it is possible that he genuinely is so ignorant that he believed that he could just pretend to be a Topolopex Path of Exile player on a stream using someone else's account.
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But, like, there's no way anyone who plays video games could fall for that. And a lot of people he talks to about this stuff are people like Joe Rogan, who aren't, like, gamer TM people, right? It's a lot of people who aren't gamers that he's sort of hyping up his reputation with. And so he's really, on the one hand, yeah, he is signaling to his sort of fascist base.
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But on the other hand, he's trying to use this sort of cultural cachet of gaming as this sort of renegade right-wing phenomenon to launder his reputation. Except he fucked up. Because he spent all of this time trying to...
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pretend to be a gamer but the thing about gamers is that like there is literally an entire genre of video like on YouTube that is very very popular that is just like people exposing people who cheated video games and cheated records of video games and Elon has walked just like directly into this bear trap right and
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Yeah, that's also, like, that's also him signaling to, like, a different, like, the weird Christian part of the base that's, like... oh, violence in video games is bad. Which is funny, because he's trying to signal to all of his groups simultaneously. And all of them are like, this guy is a fucking loser who sucks ass, and we hate him.
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Yeah, but there is a sort of serious note to this, which is that the pushback he is getting here is, I think, actually kind of insignificant. So the last thing I want to talk about is him pretending to have been like a Quake pro. It's the thing that he did. Quake pro.
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And there's a very interesting video about this by the YouTuber Carl Jobs, who is like, his thing is like people who fake things in video games, basically. And he is like not a leftist. He's like a center-right guy, basically. I mean, there's arguments about exactly how far right he is. But he did a video about Elon claiming to be a Quake player.
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And what he found, so Elon apparently did actually play in an early Quake tournament, but none of the good players were there. And his team came in second, but they came in second because they had better Wi-Fi than everyone else. And so they had less latency, which made them invincible until they ran into a team that also had good Wi-Fi, and then he got destroyed.
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Which I just think is funny, right? That's like a classic Elon Musk story, which is he has this thing claiming that he's like a fucking gamer legend, but it's actually because he had more money than everyone else until he ran into someone who had the same amount of money that he did and just got destroyed.
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But the reason I bring this up is that like at the end of this video, Jobs is like goes on this whole thing about how and this is this is like a stronger statement against Elon Musk than I have seen from anything in the mainstream press where he literally goes on a thing where he says, yeah, every single thing that Elon Musk has been saying here is a lie.
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And because he is just obviously lying out of his ass about literally everything in a field that I know, this means that I literally can't trust him when he says anything about any other fucking field that I don't know. And this is a real shift, right? I have never seen a mainstream journalist write down Elon Musk is just clearly a liar about this.
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And so you should not be able to trust anything else he fucking says. This is a larger degree of pushback than anything else I've ever fucking seen outside of like the left. About what Elon Musk is doing. And like just the willingness to just be like. This guy is a fucking just a serial liar. Like everything he says is a lie. He literally calls him a con. Like says his activities like a con man.
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He says the things that he's saying. Are like either lies or delusional. There is a kind of like shift happening right now. Where people like really are turning on him. There's a thing that happened literally today. Where Ubisoft. You know Ubisoft is a famously like. Not a leftist company right. Like they've done a lot of horrible. Fucked up sexual assault stuff.
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So, Elon's mad at Ubisoft because one of their games has a black guy as a character in it. And literally, the official Assassin's Creed account replied to one of his tweets saying, is that what the guy playing your Path of Exile 2 account told you? In reply to a thing about Hassan? We are genuinely seeing a shift in this space, right?
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This thing that had been a really, really consistent base of support for people like Elon is kind of fracturing against him. It's sort of being polarized against him by just the fact that he's just so obviously cynically pandering to them and how unbelievably transparent it is. And, like, obviously, like, I don't think, like, the gamers are gonna, like, fucking rise up or whatever.
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But the actual serious point to all of this, other than, like, looking at the ways that fascism, like, why these people do this, and, like, gamers is, like, a demographic that's important to these people, is that, like, the way that you destroy a coalition by this isn't necessarily by flipping everyone over to your side. Right? That doesn't happen that often.
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But one of the ways you can do this, and this is, you know, to take a really, really dramatic example, this is how the Bolsheviks won the October Revolution. They got their opponents, allies, to stay home. And that was enough. Enough people just staying on the fucking sidelines when the Bolsheviks came for currency's government was enough for them to take power.
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And I think the actual serious point of this is that the only way that we get out of this mess is by just systematically tearing away these people's coalitions so that when the confrontation with these people comes... there are enough people who would be their supporters who just fucking stay home that they can be stopped.
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I am one of the biggest things of, like, people need to remember that Lenin did not overthrow the czar. He overthrew Kerensky, who was kind of a socialist-y guy who was from the provisional government in between the... Okay, we're done. We're done here. We're done here. We're fucking out. We're leaving. What games are you playing? What games am I playing? Path of Exile 2. Don't play Brotato.
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It will consume your life. Play RoboQuest. RoboQuest is great. RoboQuest dares to ask the question, what if the art style of Borderlands was used for a game about rehabilitative justice, but also you're doing a roguelike with Doom's combat?
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This has been It Could Happen Here. I... Good lord. They pay me for this. I had to watch so many videos about Deshaun Watson and fucking clips of Elon Musk playing video games for this.
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Everyone is arguing about whether it was even a Nazi salute. You watch the video. It's a Nazi salute. The second one is a Nazi salute. None of the headlines will say that Elon Musk did a Nazi salute. The articles won't say it either. You can't tell whether they've been cowed to submission by the threat of a defamation lawsuit or if they're already running cover for the new regime.
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You scroll through your timeline. They made my gender illegal. They tried to repeal the 14th Amendment through executive order to end birthright citizenship. You can't follow it. It's too much. The world has become a spectacle. And that spectacle is trying to kill you. Welcome to It Could Happen Here. I'm your host, Neil Wong. In societies where modern conditions of production prevail...
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all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. So wrote the French social theorist Guy Debord in his seminal 1967 work, The Society of the Spectacle. Debord is typically written off as just another theorist of early mass media. and today, his work is generally confined to the art world.
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Which is, to be fair, largely a demonstration of the fact that nobody who talks about him has ever gotten past the opening paragraphs of the book, and made it to the part where he demands the formation of armed workers' councils. But this is the age of the spectacle, in ways more nightmarish than Debord could ever have predicted. His elaborate metaphor is rendered thuddingly literal.
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Quote, everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation. And indeed, living has been replaced by the image of living. This phenomena is called Instagram. The spectacle, Society of the Spectacle opens, is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people mediated by images.
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Today, we literally call the collection of images we use to relate to each other social media. Quote, "...lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, while simultaneously absorbing the spectacular order, giving it positive cohesiveness.
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A reality TV star, the old human symbol of the spectacle, in which everything that was directly lived has been transformed into a representation." is now a president the second time, driven by streamers and influencers and podcasters who stand as the new human symbols of the spectacle. They have invaded real society and now rule it directly.
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In the 1960s, the debate was whether you could ignore the spectacle because it wasn't real. Debord's elegant solution was that contemplating the spectacle makes it real. None of that matters anymore. You can't ignore the spectacle because it's here. It has physically invaded the world. Donald Trump is the president. The richest man on earth is Nazi saluting Elon Musk.
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The autonomous force Debord described as a spectacle no longer operates at the abstract level. It is the president of the United States. Everything is rendered thuddingly, transcendently literal. In DeBoer's usage, the spectacle is the management of society by mediating people's social relations through images. This sounds complicated, but on an intuitive level, you already understand this.
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You and I relate to each other through the one-way mirror of a podcast app. You relate to others by reacting to their TikTok videos. You watch the bombs fall on Palestine on Twitter. You relate to each other and the world through images, and that relation is a system of control.
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As Debord describes it, that mediation takes you out of the real world, a world that you can actually change with your actions, and thrusts you into the world of the spectacle, a world where reality is, quote, an object of mere contemplation. Today, we call this the discourse. The work that inspired the 1968 revolutions called it the spectacle. Why does it feel like this?
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The rot, the decay, the unreality of the moment that consumes you until one day Donald Trump is president and the next he's president again. The board has a simple answer. It's because the entire political, economic, and technological system is designed to make you isolated, afraid, and alone. Quote, "...technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn.
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From the automobile to television, all of the goods selected by the spectacular system are also weapons for a constant reinforcement of the condition of isolated, lonely crowds." Later, he writes, what binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center, which maintains their isolation. The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.
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This is why the world feels like an endless doom scroll. Instagram, TikTok, live streaming, this podcast, they're all based on isolation. Look at what happened to social media during the isolation of the pandemic, how it came to consume even more of our lives with the promise of connection that simply rendered us more and more and more isolated.
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The spectacle, given technological form in the social media app, turns us into a mass in which we are all, somehow, terrifyingly alone. We're not people who form a crowd that could do anything from celebrate a holiday to burn a third precinct. We're spectators. We're listeners. We're viewers. We're chat. Not living, but commenting on the image of living.
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The spectacle, the app, the image, mediates our social relations with each other and ensures that together in a lonely crowd, we rot in isolation and do only the two things the capitalist system needs us to do, work and consume. Atomized individuals are the ideal subject of capitalism, the basis on which everything is built.
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You entered into a free contract to live under a state, says the social theorist. You, the individual, gave up your labor to your boss voluntarily in another free contract between individuals, says the economist. Do not organize with anyone else to get paid more for that labor, or God help you try to create a system where you aren't forced to sell your labor every day.
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That's cheating, says the politician. Your job is to sell your labor, buy these products, and comment on a world in which someone else is acting. The isolation of the spectacle ensures that we're incapable of collective action. Not only because we're incapable of forming a collective, we're not even engaging in the world in which action can take place.
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The extent of the advance of the spectacle today is such that the unfolding of the economic system is designed to turn every part of you into a commodity. Not just your labor, but your identity, your beliefs. Everything that you are is sold to everyone else's spectacle. And in turn, everything that defines you becomes the spectacle itself.
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In a world where there is no action, just the image of someone else's action somewhere else, a commercialized political identity is much easier to adopt than actually doing politics. You don't have to do politics. You can just put on a red hat and watch the man on TV make the liberals angry. You don't need relations with your family. You have Facebook groups.
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Your relations to the world are relations to images. David Graeber wrote that the ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.
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But the second, slightly less ultimate hidden truth is that almost everything we think of as objects, money, capital, commodities, are really just relations between people abstracted out onto something physical. We interact with each other by using objects as forms of command. What do you think money is? Instead of having real, equal social relations.
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And that makes it all the more dire that the social relations that compose this world are no longer even relations with each other at all, but relations with images. The spectacle is a strategy of control. As Debord writes, "...where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior.
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The spectacle is a tendency to make one see the world by various means of specialized mediations." it can no longer be grasped directly. As the spectacle advances, even rebellion is reduced to meaningless attacks on the symbols of power, never touching power itself.
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Jesus Christ. And that's assuming there's no new ones.
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But when the insurgents manage to penetrate parliaments, presidential palaces, and other headquarters of institutions, as in Ukraine, in Libya, or in Wisconsin... It's only to discover empty places, that is, empty of power and furnished without any taste. So wrote the Invisible Committee in the distant Halcyon days of 2014. It could have been written yesterday.
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Nine years later, the insurgents, now on the right, produced their masterpiece. Brazil's even more ineffectual cousin of January 6th. known forever as January 8th.
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On that day in 2023, for reasons that are almost totally incomprehensible to anyone whose mind has not been utterly melted by prolonged and terrible exposure to the spectacle, supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro stormed Brazil's capital. Bolsonaro, of course, had already fled to Florida.
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The presidential palace, Congress, and the Supreme Court were literally empty when the protesters took them. There was nothing to be won, nothing to be gained. The protesters' vain hopes that simply seizing the symbols of power would trigger a military coup to remove Lula and restore the Bolsonaro regime evaporated like a morning dew, leaving nothing in their wake.
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January 6th, at least, attacked the site of the ritual of power while the ritual was technically in progress. The attack was, of course, designed to stop the certification of the election.
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Congress was at least in session, even if that attack, too, was the culmination of a series of ineffectual reruns of the Brook Brothers riots in which right-wing political operatives did manage to steal an election by stopping the vote count in Florida in 2000. On January 8th, no one was even there. So how do we get out? Lashing out at the symbols of power is pointless.
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But you can't ignore them either. Elon's Nazi salute really does represent something. The opening of any solution is to go to the source. Trump and Elon are symptoms, not the disease. The spectacle is born of capitalism. It's a management strategy designed to suppress any attempt to end or even rearrange the terms of the class system. Trump and Elon were likewise produced by two settler colonies.
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They are, in their own ways, the manifestation of the evil of colonialism and racism. Debord's solution to these problems, of course, well, the solutions that people bother to read. There is a staggeringly racist section of this work about how time passes in China that I simply cannot recommend. But Debord's solution was workers' councils.
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And he got his wish the next year during the factory occupations of 1968. It nearly worked. But the last workers' council fell a quarter of a century ago in Argentina. And there's no sign that the workers' council, the definitive fighting form of the working class for over a century, is coming back. In some ways, this is liberating.
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170 years ago, Marx wrote this in the 18th premier of Louis Bonaparte, his own response to a nation's nationalist attempt to restore its former glory by invoking the name of a previous leader. The social revolution of the 19th century cannot take its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstitions about the past.
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In the days and weeks and months, and God help us all years to come, we're going to have to assemble a new fighting form. And no one knows what it looks like yet. We could, perhaps, look at the airport protests from the first months of the original Trump administration.
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where masses of people, including a very young Mia who had not quite realized what gender she was, occupied airports all across the country to stop the implementation of Trump's Muslim ban by physically forcing the government to release the people who had detained in the airports.
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The power of those protests was that they directly located the site where power was operating, the airport, and took them. The weakness of those protests was that people went home.
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And they went home because they had been told time and time and time again by the ACLU and by other legal organizations that the fight was over, that they could leave, and that the Muslim bans would be defeated by the courts. Most of you lived through it. Some of you remember. The Muslim ban was never defeated by the courts. It could possibly have been defeated in those moments. It wasn't.
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The contest was taken away from the real side of power and into a domain largely ruled by the ruling class. But we can learn from both January 8th and the airport protests. Marching to a building doesn't guarantee you're actually targeting power. You must understand how the system is operating before you attempt to gum up its works. A thousand miniature January 8th's is no solution at all.
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You must do the hard work of sifting through the tangle of rumors and lies and attempting to work out the actual structure of repression. It starts with community self-defense. It starts with actually engaging with each other instead of the mediated images generated by an algorithm. You want to break out of the spectacle? Talk to the people around you.
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Talk to the trans people and the immigrants in your life and find out what they actually need. Figure out the concrete steps you can take to organize the people around you and the steps you can take to lift them out of their despair. We're not going to develop a new fighting form glued to our phones alone in a digital crowd.
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We're going to figure it out by talking to each other, by acting in the real world, not by being rendered passive observers of the spectacle. We're going to do it by finding the real places where power operates and taking them. And above all, we're going to do it together.
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Yeah, wasn't he the guy that Trump brought in specifically to destroy the post office as part of the campaign to steal the election?
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That's actually a pretty common... I mean, this is one of Amazon's strategies, right? Through their warehouses. They intentionally want to cycle through people because the more new people you have continuously cycling through, the less organized and the less sort of like... Less knowledge they have, less you have to pay them, etc., etc., etc.
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And so if you can just cause high turnover rates on purpose, that's a thing that a lot of these sort of business ghoul, like nightmare factory people... love in their workforces and makes everyone else's life just a living hell. But, you know, they're still getting paid.
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Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor darkness can stop the Persian courier service. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about postal services where we ask the question, can the American capitalist class finally stop the American post office? I'm your host, Mia Wong, and with me to talk about What is going on with the post office? What's going on with the post office unions?
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Well, and that's also just sort of like an organizational problem, right? Like if your organization is set up in such a way that a small number of people being incapacitated means total paralysis and no one has any idea what's going on, that's just a bad way to run something, right?
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And especially it's a terrible way to run a union because the union's power is supposed to be from its organization and from the collective power of a large organization of people who can make decisions for themselves.
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And if that's not happening and you get to the point where these decisions are being made by a very small number of people who can just sort of vanish, like that's – for whatever – literally whatever reason that is, right? It could just be you get sick. It could just be like whatever happens. That's just a terrible way to organize things.
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I guess it's also like I want to take a little tiny tangent to be like, if you're doing any organizing project, your goal is to organize yourself out of a job. Ideally, if you were in an organization, it should be able to function without you. Having an indispensable person is a fiasco. Don't do that.
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And yeah, how things are going downhill for the noble people who carry your mail is Tommy Espinoza, who's a union steward for the National Association of Letter Carriers. Tommy, welcome to the show.
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This is true of both your tiny local mutual aid group as much as it's true of your giant national union. So this has been Mia talking about the indispensable person don't have.
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Yeah, I'm really happy to, and I'm really happy to get to talk to you about this. So, I think the place we should start is with a bunch of very, very weird stuff in how labor law works. So, okay, for most people in the United States, you have a federally protected right to strike if you have a union. That is not true for federal employees.
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Yeah, well, I think there's two things about that. One, I mean, I don't... And this is something I've gotten to with a lot of the sort of interviews that I've done on this show, is that I think... a lot of very, very basic jobs have labor conditions that are unimaginably appalling that people just don't know about.
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And I think people are very sympathetic to once they actually understand what's happening in the kind of just horror show stuff that's happening in these workplaces. And the second thing I think that's sort of important in terms of
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getting people to you know like try trying to actually do like mass mobilizations even just to get people to understand what's going on is that i think a lot of people who are facing these kind of conditions think that they're alone and think that it's just something that happens to them or they've been in them for so long they think that it's sort of normal and having a bunch of people go no like a this happens and b it shouldn't happen
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is extraordinarily powerful because you know like that that feeling of isolation is is the thing that all of that you know your that your bosses depend on to make sure that you know you you just keep going along with these conditions even though they are just objectively horrific and i think any strategy that's not based on that is just not going to go anywhere
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That is especially not true for members of the post office. And that is a real issue because the government has decided that like, yeah, no, all these people who do a vital service are not allowed to go on strike. And it absolutely sucks. Yeah. And so I think this this gets into sort of.
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Yeah, and I think that's a great place to end, unless you have anything else that you want to make sure we get to?
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Yeah, so how can people support you and postal workers just in general if there's a specific place you want them to go?
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Well, yeah, we will put that in the show notes. I hope you all win. And I don't think I've ever said this genuinely in my life, but thank you for your service.
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Yeah, it absolutely is. And I mean, I think that's sort of the beauty. I mean, it's both the beauty and the horror of this world is that on the one hand, all of us are being crushed by the same sets of forces. But on the other hand, it means that whatever fight that you're taking is also a part of the larger fight for get all of us free.
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Yeah. Yeah, this has been Nick Adapa here. Go make trouble for people who suck.
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Where I want to start, which is with the sort of history of the National Association of Letters Carriers, a union that is not allowed to strike and how sort of weird that is. So, yeah, I was wondering if you could talk a bit about sort of the origins of the union and what effect that has had on how organizing works or doesn't work.
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Yeah, that's a debilitating set of conditions because you've effectively taken away sort of the two major tools that unions of basically across all political stripes use, right? You've taken away the ability to strike. You've taken away the ability to use your dues money to influence elections.
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So this immediately means you've taken away the tool that sort of militant unions use, which is strikes, and you've taken away the tools that more conservative unions use, which is attempting to buy politicians. And then also your leadership is like, we can't strike us. I mean, we can't protest because someone might think it's a strike or the public might come at us.
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And it's like that, that doesn't seem, I don't know. It really seems like it's like, it's not only have you tied both hands behind your back, you've like tied them behind your back to your legs. You're now rolling around on the ground. Right.
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Isn't that right? Yeah, I know. Spoken like someone who has never watched a federal government in action.
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Yeah, I mean, it's something that it's a part of being in a union that doesn't get talked about very much, which is that the contract doesn't mean anything unless the union enforces it. Because the moment the contract happens, the bosses will attempt to not abide by it. And this is what a lot of union militancy back in the sort of heyday of militancy was.
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I mean, if you look at how the UAW worked in the 60s, they'd have a guy with a whistle standing on the line. And if someone did a contract violation, he would blow the whistle and everyone would just sit down. And you'd immediately have a strike, right?
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And like that level of militancy, you don't need to be at that level to enforce a contract, but you have to actually be willing to do stuff and to fight management over it. And if you're not willing to do that, your contract is effectively meaningless. And that's a real issue with a lot of unions.
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Which, the thing I think is really interesting, just to circle back to the 1970s strike, is that... So the strike was illegal, right? Nixon brings in the Army and the National Guard to break it, and the strike still wins?
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And not only does it... You know, I mean, you could argue whether it achieved total victory, but not a single person who walked off the line got arrested, even though all of them technically committed a crime. And that's something that, like, you know, I think... Okay.
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The enforcement of laws depends on a set of relative balance of forces and whether people care about enforcing the law, which is how, for example, if you pirate seven movies and you get three copyright strikes, you go to prison, but the Sam Altman or whatever AI company can...
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literally steal everything on the entire internet and get money for it and no one will ever prosecute him right and so so you know whether or not something is illegal is to a large extent or the difference between something being illegal and you going to prison for it
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largely has to do with the balance of forces involved and that's something that you should keep in mind when and this is this is this is the thing that that cuts the other way a lot too right like a lot like employers just do illegal actions literally all the time and it doesn't matter because the state doesn't care
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Yeah. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads for a little bit because unfortunately, my my my boss's boss's boss's livelihood depends on these ads. Mine technically does, too. But like, Lord knows, I don't see that money. So ads. We are back.
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And yeah, I guess that leads into the next place you want to go to, which is talking about what are the specific grievances today that y'all are dealing with and the union is not dealing with?
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The richest man in the world does a Nazi salute while giving a speech at the inauguration of the new president. He does a second one. In another age, it is the most significant event in world history. It's maybe the third most fascist event of the day. NBC re-uploads the address and cuts away from the sig hail it broadcasted live. You refresh your timeline.
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I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.
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I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.
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I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.
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I'm Clayton English. I'm Greg Glod. And this is season two of the War on Drugs podcast.
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Could you tell a little bit about what the specific thing was so that if people are like experiencing it themselves, they can know what, what they can do?
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Yeah, it's really scummy. And I think morale is a terrain of struggle. And that's one of the things here, too, where it's like a lot of these efforts are just attempts to make everyone in a workplace miserable and attempt to make people sort of too depressed and too despondent to sort of organize.
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And a lot of that, yeah, again, is like stuff you can organize against and stuff that like they're not.
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allowed to do and whether or not they're going to be able to do it is it is a function of labor regulation and labor law is not something that's enforced by the government it's something that's enforced by you as enforced by the people around you and so you know like the law can sometimes help and sometimes doesn't it's it's useful to cite the management it's useful because it makes them think that there's like the full power of the state behind you or whatever but like in in in terms of
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how you deal with this stuff. It is something that is enforced by you, by how organized you are, and by how organized your shop floor is, and by how organized your community is. And that's something that's, I think, important for people to understand when you're forming your own unions, which you should also go do because you can just do it. I said it before and I'll say it again.
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The people who organize unions are just regular people. like you person, dear listener. So you can, you can do this too.
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Yeah, like the NLRB, we've talked about this on the show before, but the National Labor Relations Act, I think it established the National Labor Relations Board, like, that was part of effectively, like, a truce that was enforced by the government, because as a way to have, like, labor unions stop being armed and stop getting into shootouts with bosses, so yeah, it is, as this framework comes apart, it is important to remember, like,
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why we had this in the first place, which was Union militias would occasionally start small-scale civil wars in the U.S. with bosses over stuff. People would shoot cannons at each other. We're sort of distant from that period. But there's also another thing about direct action, which is that
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Yeah, it's hard to organize, but also, quite frankly, with the way that the NLRB is functioning right now, the time to organize that, A, makes your union better, and B, is going to be faster than the NLRB right now. So, yeah, this is your practical. We have your ideological pitch. We have your practical pitch for direct action, which is that it's quick.
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Unfortunately, the other thing that's quick is the approach of this ad break. Here's ads. We are back. So let's talk about sort of what's happening right now with the union, how things are going and what management has been doing.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. As the new regime settles in, we face a struggle on a thousand fronts. It's bewildering. It's terrifying. It's an offensive design to overwhelm us with the sheer totality of the horror.
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I mean, this is something that I think both union organizers and management knows, which is that the first place that unions fail is trying to get the vote, trying to get to, or just trying to get enough people organized around this sort of campaign. So the second place that they fail is before the first contract or trying to negotiate the first contract.
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And so every company just like tries to draw the shit out as long as humanly possible. Like it took us, God, I think, what, two years in bargaining? And that's like not even that, like for a first contract, I mean, that's like bad, but it's not even as bad as it can get. And there's the other aspect of it too that you've been talking about, which is that
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the way that companies break unions is just terror, right? It's just a terror campaign. It is a campaign to inflict sort of fear and suffering on people. And the fact that this is the way that the system works, that, you know, there are a bunch of people in power who are, who the way that they're attempting to keep their power is just through fear and through, like, inflicting pain on people is...
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But its diversity is also our greatest advantage, because every struggle on every front brings us closer to victory. And that allows us, and it allows you, to pick a field and hold it. One of the most important fronts in the years to come is labor. Much of what is to come will be decided on the shop floor. And today, we're talking about that.
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just ghastly and if you want to sort of take a step back and go like why is everything like this it's like well that's because because that's what this entire system is built on it has always been built on
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Yeah, it's a snowball rolling down the hill. The more shops are organized, the more that will convince other shops to organize. And the larger that snowball is, the harder it is to stop its momentum. But what do you think the next steps are going to be for this campaign?
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If you can actually talk about it in terms of putting pressure on the company, in terms of drawing other people in, in terms of what's going on in the shops.
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And with me to talk about that is fellow worker Dino, an IWW Pizza Union organizer in Berkeley, and fellow worker Cole, who's an IWW Pizza Union organizer in Portland. And both of you two, welcome to the show.
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Yeah, and you can see that it's not the same company by just, like, oh, yeah, hey, they've... You know, I mean, and this is not a defense of, like, small businesses, which also do just absolutely terrible shit to workers. Like, if you've ever worked for one, like, good lord.
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But, you know, like, as these companies get larger and larger and as this sort of... The endless march of capital goes on, you know, like, you see the current, like...
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nightmare of oh hey here's like an additional 50 of your workload and also you don't get tips on it and you know unless this stuff is rolled back and unless people understand what's happening unless it's more organizing like that's just the latest terrible thing that's going to happen they're they're like five years down the line they're going to have invented a new app that like does something the magnitude of the horror of which we haven't even like comprehended yet like
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I don't know. We're probably two years out from like the Chinese style thing where you could order a coffee on a train and someone has to go run out to the train platform to the next station to hand it to you on the train. There are depths of even this algorithmic hell that we haven't hit yet.
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And the only way for us not to continue to plunge the depths of suffering with a line the size of the universe is by organizing more. And by getting people to understand that all of these sort of progressive brands are a thin veneer for exploitation and suffering.
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Hello. Thank you for having me on. Yeah, me too. I'm excited to talk to you both. So this is a Pete's Coffee Union. We have talked to several other unions, but this was kind of personal to me because this is one of the sort of coffee things that my dad kind of grew up on. And I'm now now here to deliver wrath against them for their many crimes.
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Yeah, I think that's a good place to end. If people want to support y'all, where should they go? We'll also have links to stuff. And what other things can they do to help?
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Oh, yeah. And Jesus Christ, I had a terrible based coffee people of the world unite pun thing, but it's it's slipped from my mind. All right. All of you will be spared by terrible coffee related puns as long as you go organize your workplace. So go do that. Go join the struggle. Go make it stronger. And I don't know, like there's going to be a number of you for whom this is like not your terrain.
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Right. And if this isn't your terrain, find it. Find find the struggle that you are going to do and weigh and wage it there and take your field and hold it.
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So, yeah, let's start off with can we talk a bit about how these unions came together and what the sort of like beginning process of this organizing look like?
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Oh, I keep forgetting that you do an actual throw instead of actually saying the name.
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Only been doing this for several hundred episodes now. You'd think. You'd think. But no. You got it. You got it. Hello. I'm excited to do this. Also excited for the Mexico episodes because Mexican anarchism is a trip. Uruguayan anarchism is also a whole lot of people digging tunnels out of prisons. But we'll get to that later. We will. We will.
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have a very silly like kind of like how did I like actually finally become an anarchist because I've been around anarchists for a long time but like the thing that like actually convinced me to be an anarchist is I sat down and I got a bunch of like anarchist history books from a library and started reading them so
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So specifically it was a lot of like corrupts like Harashuzo and pure anarchism in Japan, which I've talked about on the show a hundred billion times. I actually think I read Capoletti's Anarchism in Latin America around that time too. It's a very good resource. Yeah, yeah. So pretty familiar with stuff. But yeah, we'll see. We'll see. I'm excited to talk about it.
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Yeah, it's a very, well, usually, it's a very syncretic ideology. It pulls from a lot of different places and it pulls from lots of different, of its own strands.
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I mean, the opposition to hierarchy on a basic level, the opposition to the state, to capitalism, to patriarchy, to systems of hierarchical power.
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is I guess like the baseline definition and then also in terms of what it's you know the replacement for that can be a lot of things but yeah it's the building of a society where we don't have power over one another I think it's like a very baseline kind of thing
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Oh, yeah. So it was an independent thing that became an IWW.
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Yeah, Bakunin sucks in a lot of ways, but the creative verge is a destructive one. Has the order of events correctly, where the point is to create something? Exactly.
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He's a mixed and baffling figure who also was a pretty large influence on Marx if you read him, even though Marx hates him, which is very funny.
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Yeah, and people may know this who listen to this show, but the term libertarian was invented by anarchists specifically to describe how they were different from for Don because they weren't sexist. It's a whole thing. Actually wasn't aware of that. Yeah. That's why in most parts of the world, libertarian is a term that means anarchist.
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That's so cool. Yeah. You want to talk a little bit about like what the sort of process of doing that initial organizing before you went to the unions look like and how everything sort of came together?
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It's mostly largely in the US where that's not a thing because the right libertarians took it.
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I think these people are very... Okay, this is one of the things about being an anarchist, right?
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This is the thing about being a leftist, and it's something you have to be able to set aside when you have to do things, but a lot of being a leftist is being annoyed at other leftists, and I could put together an actual detailed theoretical critique of anti-politics, but mostly the people who talk about anti-politics just annoy me. It's like an affect thing.
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Yeah, that was the Graeber line. I think Ursula K. Le Guin kind of had a similar relationship towards calling herself an anarchist.
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Yeah, I think her line was like she didn't feel like she could because you had to do it. But yeah, it's a pretty common way of thinking about anarchism that I like a lot.
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Yeah, because the thing about hierarchies is that every hierarchy argues that it's just. You would get slave owners doing these whole speeches about the inherent morality of slavery. It's not actually an ethical position that leads you to the opposition to hierarchy because, again, every hierarchy is self-justifying.
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Yeah, and the way that it turns into a relationship of ownership is something that genuinely can and should be opposed, but it's also something that gets a lot harder to oppose when you're sort of stuck up on this, like, well, actually, no, it's good because this is authority or whatever. So I think the way that Chomsky obfuscates this stuff makes it harder to actually do politics that's useful.
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Unfortunately, we have to go to ads. Disaster, fiasco, sharp principles in shambles. But here's ads.
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Incredibly silly. People who are otherwise reasonably intelligent will just say this stuff. It's like, really? What are we doing here? Just come on.
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Yeah, I want to go back to the slavery thing specifically about authority, because the argument that it's an imposition of authority for slaves to free themselves is an argument that was specifically made by the Southern plantation class. Like that was that was their argument about federal tyranny was that specific argument.
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So it's probably not a good theoretical basis for understanding what authority is. If you're making the same argument as the Southern plantation class, it's going to just get it's going to leave the wood out there.
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Yeah, there's a paper I always think about where I found it, like a kind of liberal, well, like a maybe center-lefty academic writing about Malatessa, who we've talked about a lot on this show. He's an Italian anarchist, did a whole bunch of stuff.
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So when the Italian revolutions are happening in 1918, 1919, like Malatessa comes back to Italy because he'd been all over the world doing a whole bunch of other stuff. And he gets called Italy's Lenin.
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Yeah, all over Latin America. He's in the US. And so he gets called the Lenin of Italy. And this paper was about, did he actually act like Lenin? And the conclusion that they came to was like, well, no, he didn't come back to Italy to attempt to seize control of the country.
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He simply did not because he was an anarchist, because that's what it means to sort of, you know, have influence, but not like rule. Exactly. Exactly.
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Yeah, one thing I'm curious about is how large roughly are these shops?
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Yeah, also, I need to put the trans note here, which is that, like, it is very hard if you're trans to find a doctor that you personally trust because, oh boy!
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Yeah, and so it's also an example of why you can't just sort of blindly accept the authority. You can't accept the authority of people who have expertise because it's like, sometimes they don't. Exactly, exactly. Like, a lot of times, in fact, the credentials don't actually mean that this person knows anything about trans healthcare. Like...
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Yeah, and it's something that you have to have a kind of balance between what, you know, kind of like neoliberal, like, technocracy where you get, like, we put the experts in charge and the quote-unquote experts running the economy, like, did 2008. They all come out to, like, right-wing think tanks. Yeah, yeah.
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And on the other hand, the kind of, like, reflexive contrarianism and desire to build a new expert that gets you, like...
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rfk jr as the future like secretary of health and human services so you know you have to sort of like jesus you have to sort of like balance between sometimes these people fuck up and also vaccines are good this is not a problem that requires us to like fly through the pin of a needle we do have to have a little bit of i don't know it's not that difficult of a problem to deal with but
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But the way that authority is construed has created a sort of backlash to it that has been used to sort of delegitimate genuine, useful expertise and create sort of like false expertise.
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But, you know, I don't know. I have eternal cynicism.
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No. Some fucking assholes in Philadelphia 200 years ago were like, we're going to set up a thing and also slavery is good. That's like, really? What are we doing here? In what meaningful way did I agree to this?
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Yeah, it's something I think is going to become increasingly visible in the US over the next few years, coming out of a period where it was slightly more obfuscated. But all of the people who are about to be coming into power, if you spend even the tiniest amount of time, you will see them start talking about fucking racial IQ shit and all of this...
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really pretty pretty explicit ideology that they have that like of of this sort of like racial superiority that they think they have that's like a you know that is like the motivating ideological factor and also the thing that you sort of justify their power yeah it's it's unfortunately becoming more and more uh open and common now to see that sort of discourse on mainstream platforms like twitter
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One of the weirder artifacts of the 2010s was David Graeber had an argument with Peter Thiel where they did a debate, and one of Graber's arguments is like, well, what do you mean our technological systems mean that we have to organize our society in a way? Is the argument that you're making that technological possibility makes us less free? It's like, no. Ducks.
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I feel like a lot of these arguments are just describing the current state of affairs and going, well, it could be like that. It's like, oh, what if, how would, like, communes deal with war It's like, wouldn't the communists just start going to war with each other? It's like, well, okay, look at the world right now and ask yourself the question, how are states dealing with the problem of war?
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Yeah, and the staffing issues, this is one of the things we're talking to, I mean, just people across sectors. It's really one of the... It's one of the things that's the most obvious if you're working one of these jobs and also somehow it's not something that ever gets talked about in the mainstream at all. Like, it's never a part of the discourse that...
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And the answer is they're dealing with the problem of war by going to war with each other. Like, what are we doing here? Exactly, exactly.
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You don't have a set number of hours that you're going to work. You don't know when you're going to work them. And also, there's no guarantee that you're going to get to work enough hours to actually survive. And then also, the entire condition of labor, like every sector, is just chronic. It's just chronic underscheduling and chronic...
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So today I am joined once again by... Mio Wong, also who does this podcast and who is excited to talk about building the new world in the shell of the old.
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understaffing of everything and it you know and that that ranges from like coffee shops like hospitals to schools to like everyone has decided that the way that you manage things is by by chronically overworking everyone and trying to pay people as little as possible by not giving them hours can you talk a little bit more about about the kind of the the actual effects of the understaffing and how that sort of drove people into the campaign
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yeah like patriarchy for example something that is i mean like obviously yes patriarchy is enforced by the state and by like explicit violence but it's also really really enforced by norms yeah in a way that like you know requires you to like reckon with norms as a concept theoretically yeah there's a concept of authority that is inherent in patriarchy and that is also the set of norms that that exist to aid and to reinforce you know that authority
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yeah and it's funny because like that's the the sort of justification that capitalism uses that like oh if everyone that purely acts in their self-interest and everything will like get better for everyone you know but it's effectively just like a coat of paint that's been put on a system that people use their self-interest to make things better for exactly them yeah
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Good for the drivers, but you should get paid too. Yeah.
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Yeah, and it seems like the incentive structures for these delivery services add up really badly in terms of the way that incentives people to order. Because you have these minimums on the amount of stuff you have to order to get below. There's all this threshold stuff of like, if you do this, you get free delivery, you spend this much, you get blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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By the way, for people who miss it the first time, like a few months ago, we did record an entire episode about the things that he actually did, which are unbelievably funny. So go listen to that. We're not going to talk about them here, but it's very, very funny corruption.
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So yesterday, on Tuesday the 18th, Trump signed an executive order that... effectively is just him saying the words, I am the law over and over again. The actual sort of content of the executive order is convoluted, but basically what he's saying is that like the presidency and like him specifically is in control of, of all government agencies.
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Um, and this is an end to a very, very longstanding practice of, well, okay. Attempt to end the longstanding practice of there being like independent regulatory agencies, which were set up by Congress, um, And what Trump is doing here is claiming that, you know, this is the thing called the unitary executive theory. There's a whole history of this Republican Party.
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This is the most unhinged unitary executive theory thing we've ever seen, where he is just straight up claiming that he should be able to run all these things that none of these independent regulatory agencies. And this includes stuff like the FCC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, stuff like that.
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And so that, yeah, it seems like the sort of perfect maelstrom for...
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actually all just directly answered to him and not to, you know, Congress or as, you know, function as independent bodies like they were set up to be by acts of Congress. It states that everyone's legal opinions that come out of these things like have to agree with legal opinions of the presidency.
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And it basically sets up a reporting thing where all of these things have to like report any major policy decisions that they're going to make to Russell Vought, who's like one of the co-authors of Project 2025. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So in some sense, it's a codification of the stuff he's already been trying to do.
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Yeah. And there's a there's a number of sort of alarming things about this. One, this is a like even by the standards of like peak war on terror Bush administration shit where they're just like grabbing people off the streets. Like this is a unprecedented sort of seizure of executive power, too.
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And I think this is also worth noting in the context of a bunch of the shit he's been saying over the past week. Like last week he had the he who saves his country does not violate any law, which is like, I think a fake Napoleon quote.
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Yes. Yeah. Okay. So I want to come back onto the thing for a second and talk about one of the things that probably will be the crucial legal fight, which is that he's claiming the ability to be the person who interprets the law. And, you know, there's a whole bunch of sort of legal fuzziness about that and about to what extent these things are supposed to be independent.
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But probably isn't the culmination of his attempt to literally like rule the entire country by executive fiat. But this is like a big step. Yeah, this is a massive step towards that. And I think, you know, and again, this is one of these things where we literally have no idea what the consequences of this will be.
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Because, like, we are so far into the great beyond that shit is happening that a year ago, if you proposed it, everyone would have thought you were completely out of your mind.
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Yeah, and I want to end with, like, one of the other really chilling parts of this, which is that if you read the executive order, the underlying logic of it is that, like, the president is, like, the physical manifestation of the will of the people. Yeah, it's just the Fuhrer principle. Yeah, yeah. Never been done before.
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Like, that and also specifically that Napoleon quote about, like, he who saves the country is not violent at all. Like, that is literally the legal principle that Carl Schmitt developed, like, specifically to put Hitler in power as the Fuhrer.
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Yeah, it seems like the way that the integration of these apps into these business models is working, is it's just every single thing they do just compounds the amount of work you have to do and compounds how awful the experience is. And speaking about how awful the experience is, unfortunately, we are a podcast sponsored by ads, so go experience them, or don't. I don't know.
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If you have Apple, there's a thing you can get called Coolers on Media where you don't have ads. The Android one... I don't even know what I'm legally allowed to say about that shit, but oh my god, it is the biggest legal clusterfuck I've ever seen in my entire life. We're gonna leave it at there, but we're trying. We're doing our best. We are so back.
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Also, we have to mention, too, the diabetes part of this. Yeah. Where that is an unbelievably alarming thing for him to be saying. Yeah. It's pretty bad. Because, like, the thing about diabetes is you don't have... Like, your body can't... Like, literally can't physically fucking process shit. You can't actually solve that with exercise.
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It's bad stuff. Either that or we are simply going to move to an economy that is entirely based on the consumption of cocaine and meth. Like, one of these things is going to happen.
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Yeah, so let's go into their other of their myriad crimes.
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Why not? Mia, Mia. Tariff talk. OK, OK. I got a through line, which is that Trump is announcing that he's going to maybe sign an executive order to put into effect more tariffs. One of those is pharmaceuticals, which would actually would actually like possibly impact your health care. So there's my tie in. OK.
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But the main thing is auto imports like computer chips and pharmaceuticals are supposed to get, we think in April, like a 25% tariff. It's again unclear whether these will go into effect.
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But I think it's worth noting this because, and this is something I haven't seen anyone put together for reasons that are absolutely baffling to me, but I actually think that a big part of the pharmaceutical industry
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Like, tariff threat here is specifically to threaten Denmark into selling Greenland because one of Denmark's largest companies is Novo Nordisk, who would get absolutely colossally fucked by this. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and so we sort of have to look at all of these in the context of, like, what kinds of negotiations are going on. The chips one is pretty obviously, like, a China-Taiwan one, although...
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the cars the auto import one i think is is pretty specifically it's it's it's it's all auto imports i think it's pretty specifically targeted at mexico because there's a whole bunch of uh u.s auto like like full car imports from mexico but yeah 25 tariffs we'll see exactly what happens with this round of negotiations but Who knows? They might go into effect.
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This might also be part of the push to the U.S. to seize Greenland. This is also less of a Trump thing, but I think it's worth noting the sort of seriousness that both the kind of people around Trump and also like the media in Canada is taking like a potential U.S. attempt to just like seize Canada. Like, oh, yeah.
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That also, by the way, and the extent to which this matters is basically zero because they don't give a shit what the courts say, but that's also a violation of the court order. Pretty much. They did not put up the website as it was at the time when it was specified for. They have put new bullshit into it.
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Yeah, that's the thing that happens, by the way, like if you're submitting an unfair labor practice and the company resolves it, you don't actually have to. And this is actually one of the things about UOP sometimes is that like neither you nor your employer wants to go sit in front of the National Labor Relations Board and like do a whole thing.
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There's good news. There is good news on this front, which is that President Trump is very, very mad that his new Boeing plane, his personal plane, I think it's another Air Force One or something, isn't coming fast enough. So he's now encouraging them to do a rush job on it and let people in who don't have the right security clearances. So this whole thing may resolve itself.
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So like sometimes you can get them to resolve it just by like just by the threat of it. And then you don't actually have to go sit in front of the National Labor Relations Board because they've done the thing they were supposed to do. So note for all you people out there who are considering filing one of these.
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Have we explained the provisional employee firing thing that they're doing for all of these on here yet?
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This is one of these things where it's like... I've been saying, not even really as a joke, that millions of people are going to die from this. But if these people are not stopped... Oh, we'll have a broken arrow. We are like two months into this. This is the second time they have tried to fire the Duke police. And they actually succeeded this time. Millions of people are going to die.
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These people must be stopped from doing this or we are going to see a cataclysm that is going to make the fucking pandemic look like a fucking joke. Like we're all going to look fondly back on like the year we spent in lockdown and a million who died as like the fucking like smoking remains of seven American cities.
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I just want to mention here, it is illegal to fire someone for union organizing. It's not the most easily enforced thing, but they legally cannot do that. So just note for all the people who are listening to union episodes for the first time, they can't do that. And if they do it, you can launch campaigns and you can sort of force them to do it.
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But yeah, just this is the meal labor note of the episode.
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Like, you know, they like that, like those, those kinds of relations are not actual community relations. Yeah. But when the bosses talk about community, that's what they mean. They mean like our collective community Walmart. They mean preserving the relation of extraction that they have. Yeah. And we are using the same word and reading something literally so radically different than that.
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I think this is a good place to sort of start coming to a close. This is a fundamental question about what the nature of our society is going to be, right? Is the fundamental nature of our society that a community is a bunch of people who buy things and a bunch of people who make money from you buying things and who make money from the labor that you do, right?
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And then take credit for the labor and take credit both financially for the labor and in public for the labor, right? Is our society going to just be a bunch of pure commercial relations where a bunch of people get very, very rich off the labor of everyone else in the society and get to rule them as sort of like these petty tyrant kings?
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Or is it going to be a society where the people who produce the society control it?
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And that society is a democratic society, is an egalitarian society, is a society where people are free to do the things that they need to do, and people are free to have a life where they can fucking pay for their groceries, where they're not forced to go to the market for all of the things that they need to live, where you can survive in a way that doesn't involve subjecting yourself to just a tyrant for a third of your life.
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Yeah, dignity and freedom and where you don't have to go home at the end of the day of making your boss money worrying about whether you're going to be able to eat or not.
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And that's also a society that does not involve, again, at the very highest level, you getting thrown into prison camps because your god king hates you. And we can do this. We can live in that society.
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It's great. It's fun. Pickets are cool and good. If you haven't been on one, you should go on one. They're great. They're great. Yeah. It's a good time.
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Yeah, and I mean, you know, this is a job that structurally is designed to be a kind of, like... Like, again, if the goal is to have one person from, like, kindergarten to until they, like, are graduating high school, right? Like, that is something that requires, like, 1950s, 1960s-style Fordism. Like, you have one job for decades. And the only way you can...
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to that is if people are incredibly well supported and it's like the fact that it's like okay you're trying to do this but you're not paying people enough money to fucking afford food like what the hell like jesus christ yeah it's just like yeah oh my god
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Welcome to Tariff Talk, the talk where I talk to you about the turf tariffs. So, alright, the big thing that happened last week in tariffs was that Trump exempted smartphones and electronics. There's a whole suite of electronics that are exempted from the 145% turf tariffs from Liberation Day. Now, there was still a 20% tariff... on all these electronic goods from the earlier round of tariffs.
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In one of the initial rounds, there was a whole thing where he put a bunch of tariffs on.
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Yeah, but... Okay, so here's the thing, right? China... It's like additional or... Okay, so what's happening with these is that in the very, very first round of tariffs that went out, there was a 20% tariff on all Chinese goods. And so the Liberation Day tariffs, which... And then the subsequent retaliatory tariffs... Pushed it.
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No, okay, we're going to get the 250%. That number's bullshit. Okay. But we're at 145% tariff from the Liberation Day stuff. But that also had included an earlier 20% tariff. And you see why reporting about this is so fucking hard, right? So that was stacked on top of that other tariff.
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So he's removed the Liberation Day tariffs, but there still are 20% tariffs on all iPhones and all the electronic goods that are still in effect. So the tariff rate for those goods is now 20 instead of 145. But this is where things get even more murky.
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So even before the exemptions for the semiconductor stuff had been released, Trump had been talking about imposing a bunch of tariffs specifically on semiconductors. from all countries, which is going to like, again, if this is just also if you want to just kneecap your entire economy, you put in a tariff on all semiconductors from other countries, which is what this is looking like.
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It's possible the levels are going to be that high anyways. It's again worth pointing out that like there's a bunch of the parts of this production process that basically can only be done in Taiwan. which will presumably have these new tariffs on them. We don't know what they're going to be yet. They're coming in. Who fucking knows?
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But so it seems like these tariffs are being withdrawn for now due to market sort of backlash. But probably they will come back. At some point in the future, we're not 100% sure. There's also another thing I want to mention where, so the number that you said, the 250% tariff thing. So Trump tweeted that out, but that's fake. What that is, is that there are a couple of items.
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And I mean, when I say a couple, I mean like we're talking like single digit items. Like things like medical syringes that already had like 100% tariffs on them. The 145% tariff stack on top of all tariffs that were already in effect. So there's like three or four items already had 100% tariffs on them. So when you stack the 145 on top of them, they're 250%.
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But again, it's like three things, right? So that's fake. On the other hand, substantively, and this is something that a lot of people have been talking about, the difference between 145% and 245%, isn't that relevant? Because at 145%, you stop doing trading? Yeah. So it's, you know, the numbers at this point are just sort of in comedy levels.
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But yeah, so that's what's going on with the 250 number people have been going around from. It's not real. It's still 145 for all non-electronics goods, 24 electronics. There's also been a bunch of... China's been doing retaliatory stuff for a little bit, and they've been ramping up this program to restrict... U.S.
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access to rare earth elements that are necessary for a whole bunch of advanced engineering, particularly sort of defense projects. This is something that could genuinely devastate the American defense sector. Trump's plan for this is that he's threatening to use the Trade Expansion Act of 1962 to impose even more devastating tariffs. Now, It is genuinely unclear to me.
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He probably will. He probably will. Like, two weeks ago, a thousand percent tariffs would have been a joke. But no, they might. They might legitimately do a thousand percent tariffs.
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There's also been the beginnings of, on the U.S. end, sort of export restrictions from chip exports to China and countries like NVIDIA and AMD. And this is a fucking,
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big rip to the the big rip to the fucking ai people eat shit get fucked yeah so like so that that's roughly the state of of the tariffs right now more more bullshit will happen we'll be back on tariff talk next week with another round of unbelievably hideous turf tariff shit but i want to i want to move on to one more thing which is things that have been happening at the NLRB.
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So the NLRB, for people who are not regular listeners to the show, is the National Labor Relations Board. They were in charge of a whole bunch of things related to negotiations between employers and unions, or the people who certify union elections. They handle unfair labor practices disputes. And Doge effectively broke into the NLRB
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and has seized a whole bunch of information that they shouldn't have. NPR broke the story and has been doing a lot of good coverage of it. So it came in, right?
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They technically had some kind of order saying that they were supposed to be able to come in and do this stuff, and they set up and they disable all of the security stuff and all of the sort of logs and all of the sort of stuff that's supposed to verify what someone's doing on a computer system. They go in and disable all of them. They delete all traces of what they do.
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And this is a big deal because the NLRB has a lot of extremely sensitive data. It has extremely sensitive data on unions. It has a lot of extremely sensitive trade data on private companies. Now, the NLRB person who blew the whistle on this to NPR described how... So he complains to his superiors about Doge, again, just sort of breaking into this fucking office and just stealing all of this data.
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this program that they're building that's literally just called like backdoor which is like again what you would do if you were literally running a hack right and we'll come back to that in a second so the nlp person complains to his superiors like hey these doge people are just like stealing all of the data from this and then like the next day someone from doge tapes to his door pictures of him and his dogs with like a threatening thing on it
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like drone footage of him and his dog like walking which is so fucking weird i i don't even know i don't even so yeah that's that's extremely alarming um this is this is they're they're just blatantly threatening a whistleblower yeah so so the other reason that this is really concerning is that so a lot of the corporate media is focused on the fact that there's a lot of trade information in there there's also a lot of very personal information about unions about union strength about size about tactics
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about the history of negotiating things, about just where unions are and who's in them. And it's deeply unclear what Doge is going to do with this information, but it's not good. And again, and I need to emphasize this, so I talked to a friend of the show, Maya Arson-CrimeW, about this, who is someone who knows a lot about...
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Hacking and and I said to it, okay So this is what you would do if you were if you were just straight up like hacking the NLRB, right? like these are the things you would do and they went yeah pretty much so It's great. It's great.
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Yeah, the the those are just stolen bunch of information who knows what's gonna happen to it who knows what's gonna happen with their escalation of attacks on whistleblowers, but things bad things continue to go bad and
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that asks the question, what happens when the people who are trying to help put things back together are also being exploited in the process? I am your host, Mia Wong, and today we are going to be talking about a union that is attempting to do exactly that.
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Yeah. And it's like, there's just, I mean, just like a litany of horrors where it's like one, it's like, you know, when there is like, it's not, you know, like turnover in a normal job sucks. But this is like when there's turnover because people can't afford to live their lives. It's like, you're just like ripping a hole in these kids, like the fabric of their social lives.
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And then also it's like, yeah, one of these kids that is literally your job to care for dies. You just have to fucking go to work the next day. Like, it is so hideous. And it's just like.
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Yeah. Yeah. No, like it makes sense that like. Yeah, people are organizing because it's like, you know, this organization is just systemically failing both the people they're trying to help and the people whose job it is to, like, help them. Yeah.
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And with me to discuss this are Jess and Jesus, who are mentors for Friends of the Children PDX and members of the Friends PDX Union Network. Yeah, Jess, Jesus, welcome to the show.
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Yeah. So let's take one more ad break and then we will come back to talk about, yeah, how unionization efforts are going. And yeah. We are back. Yes, let's talk about how this campaign is going. So you said you've been in bargaining for like two years?
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Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm really happy to talk to you both because I think this is a very, very unique and interesting union, especially, you know, talk about especially right now. But to get people sort of rolling, can you explain what Friends of the Children is and what it is that you two do?
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You know, you're talking about, like, yeah, that they're behaving like a corporation. It's like, oh, yeah, this is exactly what, like, my employer did to me, which is, like, one of the largest media companies in the world, and they dragged out negotiations for two years.
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And, like, you know, you're talking about the sort of, like, just, like, oh, they're, like, the feeling of disrespect where they're just not getting stuff back to you. And it's like, I remember, you know, like... We'd be sitting there for a bargaining meeting and they would be an hour late.
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And they'd be an hour late because they hadn't bothered to beforehand spend time drafting out what their responses were going to be. So they were frantically trying to get it done before we were there. And we're all just sitting there for literally an hour waiting for them to show up. And it's like, okay, there are people in this unit whose job it is to stand next to car bombs.
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And you can't show up on time to this meeting that you have known was going to happen for weeks.
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It's just, I say this every single episode, this is an incredibly common union-busting tactic, is draw out the first contract, because that's the second point where unions fail, after you get recognition votes, it's like, here. Yeah, for sure.
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I think to some extent we expect corporations to do this, but it's like, okay, this is an NGO that's, the point of which is supposed to be helping underprivileged underprivileged youth. And then they're like, we're going to turn around and we're going to screw over different underprivileged youth. Like sucks.
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And that's the thing that NGOs, you know, and you see this in abortion work, you see this in, like, you see this in nursing, you see this in all of these different fields. Like, that's the thing that these NGOs use to exploit people is, you know, like, is the basic human empathy and love and care that we have for the people who we're caring for. And these people are like, aha, look at this.
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Aha, these people, they care about the thing that they're doing. We could underpay them and overwork them. It's like,
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Let's talk a little bit about like, you know, what kinds of organizing things you all have been able to do and the kinds of things you've been able to accomplish by, you know, working together, even in these really kind of like, I don't know, structurally difficult conditions.
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Yeah, as someone who got our contract, it doesn't magically solve everything, but my God, it should make your life better. It is absolutely worth it.
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Okay, so how can people support y'all both locally here and then just broader? Because most people are not here.
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Yeah, so we will have links in the description to all of that. And yeah, thank you two both so much for coming on the show. And I hope you win. And yeah, I hope you get to go back to caring for these kids and also while not having to worry about being able to live your lives.
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Yeah, it's wonderful. And yeah, and so this is, yeah, this is what could happen here. And yeah, also go unionize your workplace. You can do it. I guarantee it.
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Yeah, and I mean, you know, I think that you can look at this and see how it's supposed to work structurally. And, you know, you were talking about, like, I mean, this is supposed to be a, like, over a decade-long commitment to these kids, right?
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That ideally you're working with the same person and, you know, you're forming really deep emotional attachments because you can't not do that if you're doing this kind of work. But then also... you know, in order for that to work, I think this is, you know, you can see this from the outside, it's like, in order for this to work, this has to be a job that you could stably do for a decade, right?
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Yeah, I mean, there's this way in which you're effectively... What this job is, is you're the person who is trying to mitigate the impact of literally all of the structural systems of violence that exist in this entire country. And how they're just sort of targeted down on these kids. And your job is to try to...
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protect them as much as possible and that's unbelievable amount of like physical and emotional labor and then also like i don't know it seems pretty bad that there's only been one co-worker who's been able to graduate their kids like
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Yeah. And like, I mean, I guess like to put this in perspective for like people listening to this is like, okay, your job is to be the person like in the friend group who like manages, like when someone's like having an emotional crisis, like you have to like help them and deal with it. And that is your job for like,
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast increasingly well-named as the days go on. I am your host, Mio Wong, and it occurs to me... Over the course of the many, many, many, many, many Union episodes we've done on this podcast, we haven't really done much coverage of just straight up how do you do a strike. So, today we are going to be covering a pretty long running strike.
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We're going to say how many days it's been going. It's unclear when this episode is going to come out, so who fucking knows how long it'll be when you hear it, but... Yeah, with me to talk about this strike is Spencer Jordan, who is a rank and file member of the Urban Ore Workers Union. Spencer, welcome to the show.
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Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you about this. So this is... What day is it today? I should know this. April 15th. And as of April 15th, you've been on strike for 25 days?
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Yeah. Which, good ratios, good ratios. I think, like, Typically, you want at least, like, mid-70s if you're going to do this kind of thing. But, you know, as listeners to the show hopefully understand by now, you can't just, like, call a strike and have it happen. You know, you have to do a whole bunch of organizing.
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So I want to kind of start at the dynamics of the organizing of how this shop got going, because this is a pretty small shop from the sounds of it. And... Yeah, so do you want to talk a bit about what the basic process of getting this organizing started was like and what the social mapping looked like and stuff like that?
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This also just, I mean, like, You know, yeah, on the basic level, yeah, it's like, okay, your opponent... I guess they are your opponent. Your boss can just instantly fire you for any reason whatsoever for any amount of time. And then also you could quit the job.
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Yeah, I mean, that's probably why because I've usually had like larger... My shitty jobs have either been like government jobs or like larger companies. So there was less of the like... I heard a line recently that I wish I remembered where it was from. It might be a line from Star Trek. It's like one of the Ferengi rules, which is like, treat your employees like family, exploit them ruthlessly.
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Yeah, and it's also like, it's inescapable in a way that it isn't with like, you know, if you're dealing with people who are, you know, you're at a larger company, you're not dealing with the person. Like, there's an old Chinese expression that's like, heaven is high and the emperor is far away. Mm-hmm.
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So, you know, it's like, you know, like a lot of times you're dealing with, okay, yeah, there is like, you know, your Zuckerberg is there, but he's like, he never interacts with you. But with this, it's like, no, the small business tyrant is right there in your face all the time. And all of the weird petty shit that they want to do and all of this sort of like,
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you know, and I would say this isn't just like a unique thing of like small business owners, like people in all positions, like in all portions of like the class society have in them kind of like the capacity for cruelty. And there's just people like that, but they don't normally have the ability to just do it to you directly in your face. And that's, yeah.
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And that's like, you know, this is what you've been talking about is like, yeah, you have like these small business tyrants, like every suddenly in the same way that it's like, I don't know, you're dealing with like,
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like one of the random King Louis and you're like in the court and suddenly just like the fact that this guy doesn't like people going to the bathroom means that everyone around him doesn't get a shit, right?
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Yeah. And yet, everyone seems to think that this is sort of like, you know, and this is an argument I've been making about, like, Trump, is that, like, yeah, this is what sort of Trump and Elon and, like, that whole cadre, and, you know, if you want to go into the sort of ideologues behind it, too, this is what people like Peter Thiel want.
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When they say run the government like a business, what they mean is that they want to, like, to import the sort of, like, just the pure tyranny of the workplace and expand it into the entire political system so that their pure totalitarian corporate rule can't be challenged. Yeah, I mean, wasn't it Mussolini who coined the term the corporate state?
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Probably, although it would not surprise me if it was some other fascist theorist and Mussolini just started saying it because...
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yeah but yeah like that's you know that's a substantive thing here and what this also means is that like even in ways that are sort of hard to see like a fight over democracy in the workplace right is a part of the larger struggle against all of all the things that's happening because if you know if we're going to survive this and if we're going to make sure that we don't all live in a world where like if you say the wrong thing you can be sent to a prison camp
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Democracy, if you want this to survive, is going to have to march into the lair of the beast. It is going to have to go into the source of this tyranny itself, which is the workplace, and it's going to have to crush it there.
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And we are back. So let's get back a little bit towards the more concrete parts of the union, although I do have more to say eventually at some point about the way that sort of labor liberalism co-opted democracy in the workplace from like, you know, the old sort of like anarchist idea of workers' control, right?
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But, okay, so one thing I wanted to talk about before we sort of get into the more formal stuff about the strike is I'm really interested...
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to hear you talk about what the process of kind of onboarding you to get more involved in the union is because this is something that like okay every functional union wants to do this like if your union is not trying to bring people like its members like more to get more involved in the union and become more of the people becoming like core organizers and becoming you know like the people who are doing your bargain people are doing anything like your union is there's weird shit about it and you should probably like be looking into that
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But it's pretty hard. So yeah, can you talk a bit about the process of how you were brought in and what sort of worked and what didn't?
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Yeah, yeah. So speaking of keeping working, we need to go to ads and then we will come back and talk about the ways in which this job that requires an incredible amount of structural support to keep people there for like over a decade is failing to do that. And we are back. So, okay, now that we've sort of talked about what this is, let's talk about the actual union. Yeah.
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Yeah. So, okay, speaking of a frustration with ownership, it is time for us to go to ads one last time.
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Okay, we are back from a bunch of people who almost assuredly do not want you to go on strike, but yeah, so let's get into the process of how you actually organize a strike. Yeah, let's start from just like the very beginning. What are the kinds of things that were happening that, you know, made people think that you needed to do this in the first place?
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So can you talk about sort of how did organizing for this union start and what were the sort of issues that could have brought everyone to be like, okay, we need to do this?
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Yeah, that's bad by, like, the standards of, like, normal. It takes two years to do a fucking contract because they're just not doing shit.
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Yeah, they've read the proposals. Like, yes, okay, will your boss show up to your meeting an hour and a half late because they didn't bother to look through the proposals until literally right at the time the meeting was going to start? Yes, but will they have done it? Usually, yes!
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But still, at the point at which you are failing to show up for any bargaining session, I think you can... Look, I have always advocated that if management doesn't show up to a bargaining session, you should just be allowed to take the company because clearly they're not serious about it. But...
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God damn it. So, okay, let's talk about, like, the, just sort of the process of, like, how the discussions went for doing this. What did those sort of look like, and how did you sort of, you know, just, like, plan this thing out?
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Sometimes it works. I've seen it before. I've seen it before. Sometimes it works.
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Yeah. One more fundraising thing that I just want to mention this for people. If you're trying to fundraise for your own thing, something that we've had a lot of success with up in Portland is getting bands to do benefit shows. Because it's Portland, right? The local hardcore scene has a lot of bands that are just supportive of stuff. And we've done this for a whole bunch of different causes.
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And this can also be a good way to do fundraising things that are fun and also raise morale because...
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Yeah. There's a reason. It's not good, but there is a reason why a whole bunch of state education budgets are funded by the lottery. It does work.
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Much better. Yeah. Oh, Mia says, having turned off her lunch, her path of exile to lunch break to come to this interview. It's pretty such cases.
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Okay, so let's, speaking of, I guess this is something that's been tied into sort of all of what we've been saying here, but yeah, let's talk about, you know, sort of maintaining the strike when it starts and sort of, yeah, what have been the processes of like keeping morale up and keeping people engaged and yeah.
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I really wonder when we're going to see the day where you have companies that have six non-managers and 55 managers. I feel like we're not that far out.
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Yeah. Yeah. And you have to actually grapple with that in a way that's not the sort of like weird corporate, like we got to improve morale things. Like that's not what that means. It means like, you know, it means actually grappling and engaging with people's feelings and how and what they need in a moment and yeah. And their fears and their concerns and yeah.
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Yeah, you can't just sort of brush them aside. You have to actually grapple with it because that's what doing this stuff means.
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Yeah, and I've seen that happen with unions where it's like, you guys did not do a good job of talking to people about this. Yeah, and it can be really disruptive to attempts to do this. But on the other hand, if you do it well, it's the most powerful single thing that you can possibly do. Forging relationships that are based on...
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like the actual experience of having gone through a struggle together and having had to like literally had to face your feels on the picket line.
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Yeah. There's this Vicki Osterwald line that I think about a lot from her book In Defense of Fluting, where she talks about how I feel like it was Ferguson that this is about where like the police chief is talking about the damage to the community and they keep saying our Walmart. It's like going into a Walmart and buying something is not a community. Right.
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Yeah, it's like the closest parallel I can think of this is like there was a faction of people during the Cold War who thought that like the Sino-Soviet split between Russia and China was like faked. And like there were literally guys murdering each other. Like Chinese and Russian troops were firing artillery at each other like on the border like in 69, right?
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And there were people who were convinced for the entire Cold War.
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even as like as china is invading vietnam are completely convinced that the entire thing is a ploy and that like and that's the secretly like the ussr and the prc are working together and these are not like you know some random guys like these are these are like the guys like the peak of conservative power are absolutely convinced that this is true and this is i think yeah like this is the kind of thing we're in now just like these people are completely cooked
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They don't have any analytical ability whatsoever. They actually have drunk their own Kool-Aid.
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Yeah, and do you know what else builds a world of unreality and then attempts to sell it to you? Ooh, products and services? That support this podcast. Yes. We are back. I'm very proud of that one. That's one of the best ones I've ever done. And I just completely off the top of my head, just came back better than ever. That was really good. She's never been so bad.
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So I want to move a little bit from the just what is the state look like, how pilled are these people kind of thing to – I want to talk a bit about the sort of macro thing that's going on here because I think part of what's happening here – and it's become kind of unfashionable in academia to talk about neoliberalism because everyone got obsessed with like –
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the Chips Act and, like, the capacity of the state or whatever. But I think, actually, if you want to understand what's going on here, a good place to go is, like, going back to your David Graeber. And he has this line talking about neoliberalism. I think this might... God, I should have actually looked up where this quote is from before I quote it. I think it might be from...
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the shock of victory, but he has this line about how neoliberalism, when given a choice between making their system actually work and making it seem like any alternative to neoliberalism is impossible, it will always choose making the alternative seem impossible because that's what neoliberalism is, right? This is, you know, the sort of maxim of Margaret Thatcher is there is no alternative.
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It is a system that is designed to destroy all alternatives in the, you know, and this includes the possibility of a future.
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And the goal of this, and this is, I think, the sort of dominant affect of the years of lead paint, is this induced helplessness. Yeah, there's something, Vicky, I would ask you about the sort of like induced helplessness of this moment.
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Yeah. And that's, I think, been one of the most important aspects of everything that's been happening right now is this sort of strategy of exhaustion and this demand for someone else to make choices for you, to free you from this, just like this endless nightmare of like trying to figure out which healthcare plan you're supposed to buy and shit like that. And-
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And the right has a bunch of alternatives here, right? This is the fantasy of what Tradwives is. It's like, what if someone else did your thinking for you? It's also the entire logic behind AI, right? The sort of AI agents thing that they're pushing right now. Go listen to our CES coverage and you'll hear a bunch about it. It's like, what if someone just planned your life for you, right?
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What if you could talk to a machine and it would plan all your trips and it would tell you what to eat and it would tell you how to live? And this is... This is also the structure of how cults work. This is why cults have been able to attract people that I think the media conception of cults you wouldn't think would be in them.
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This is why there's so many engineers in cults because there's a bunch of people who have to make choices constantly and the cult is like, hey, what if I just made all of these choices for you? And this is ultimately, you know, we talked about this a little bit before. This is ultimately part of what's going on with, like, Trumpism, right?
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Because Trump is also, to some extent, like, if you're in this movement, like, you no longer have to choose anymore. You just, you know, here is the guy. The guy is going to do the thing for you. This is also... If you go back to your original sort of conceptions of fascism, right, it's about the sort of populace delegates their will into the single heroic individual.
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The single heroic individual like acts outside of the bonds of the system in order to preserve it and like does all this stuff for you. And I think there's a combination of that with this sort of paralysis and exhaustion, particularly like exhaustion and anxiety.
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Also, and this is something that is very well documented that we're not going to get into in full here, but all of the stuff we've been talking about, about the information space, where there's just constant deluge of just nonsense that's designed specifically not even necessarily to convince you that something is true, but to convince you that it's impossible to figure out what is happening and to make you just give up.
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And when you're refusing to make a choice between like, was there a gas attack in Syria or was it like staged by the rebels as a false flag, right? You're refusing to make the choice has the effect of legitimizing both of them and also removes you from sort of the field of play of action. And this has been a really important part of this to sort of demobilize the left.
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Like it's part of what the sort of Tulsi Gabbard gap it was, right, was that you could take a bunch of this sort of like rising nominally anti-imperialist thing and you could just do this shit to them. And, you know, now Tulsi Gabbard is like one of the big people in Trump world.
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Yeah. But on the other hand, the strategy of the years of lead was a strategy born of strength. Right. The years of lead paint. This is not a strategy built by people who have an incredibly solid grasp on power. Right. The actual base that put Trump in power. Right. And their actual political base is incredibly brittle. Right. They are about to tank the entire global economy.
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Like, by putting, like, 50% tariffs on, like, every single country in the world, they... Okay, let's be accurate here. On Chinese, Mexican, and Canadian goods, which is like, okay, like, I'm gonna ask you as an exercise to the reader to go look up the places that the U.S. imports things from. Right. So, like, you know, this is how you resist.
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This is how you resist your learned helplessness is by going and researching things for yourself. But, you know, they're about to annihilate the entire economy when the thing that brought into power was fury at rising prices. Right. These fucking arrogant bastards have sown the wind and they are going to reap the fucking whirlwind.
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The basis of this fucking of this entire strategy, you know, and I ask you this, like, dear listener, do you think these people can hold three hundred and thirty million people in line by sheer force? No, of course not. There's no fucking way. This is the most heavily armed population that has ever existed in human history, right?
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This strategy is a strategy that is built around getting your compliance. If they can't get your compliance by you agreeing with them, they're going to attempt to get your compliance by just taking you out of the equation, right? They need you scared. They need you confused. They need you completely convinced of your own helplessness.
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They need you to forget that as the old song says, in your hands is placed a power greater than their hoarded gold, greater than the might of armies magnified a thousandfold. They need you to forget the next line of the song, which goes, we can bring to birth a new world from the ashes of the old, where the union makes us strong. This is the entire fucking thing, right?
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If these people were actually strong, they would not need an entire strategy that was based around political demobilization. Yeah, exactly. And the thing is, right, the thing about this moment is that basically everyone is incredibly disorganized. However, comma, that means that you, just literally any random person, can just take the things that you know how to do and start organizing.
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The system is designed to make sure that you don't do that. And guess what? It's not very hard for you to pick up the things that you know how to do, for you to use the relationships and people you know in your life to get together with them and to go do things. And they are fucking terrified of this. Yes. Their entire strategy is to make sure that you simply do not do this.
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And every single one of you has the power to do this. And I know this because I also was just some random dipshit. Like I was just literally a random college student, right? Like I was just some asshole and I just started doing things, right? And I got together with my friends and we fucking, we made a tenants union and we did anti-ice stuff and we did all of this shit.
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And it wasn't that like any of us are any different than you. We just, you know, decided one day we were going to do it and it happens. To return one last time to David Graeber, one of his most famous quotes is the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently.
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And everyone who is in power right now is absolutely terrified of the idea of you making this world differently. And together we can do that.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast increasingly about it having happened. We have we have spent a long time on this show talking about what the second Trump administration is going to mean for trans people. And, you know, go listen to those episodes. The short version is that is going to be very, very bad. We're facing care bans. We're facing federal funding bans.
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Things are about to get unbelievably bleak. But this campaign didn't come out of nowhere. It is the culmination of almost a decade's worth of fighting by the right. And I think we have a tendency to treat the rights campaign against trans people as something abstract, right? As a sort of abstract political debate.
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Or even if it affects us, we tend to treat the subjects, the immediate subject of the harassment as sort of these distant, famous figures. But the issue with looking at it this way is that this harassment, the hatred, the violence is happening to real people with real names and faces who live lives exactly like yours.
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The difference between you sitting in your house right now and someone whose face is on TV is about the difference between whether a few right-wing journalists discover who you are.
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So today we're going to be talking to someone who has been subject to almost the entire spectrum and range of the sort of emergent far right campaign against trans people who has seen basically the entire campaign against trans people evolve specifically in the far right's harassment against them. And that person is the artist and musician Precious Child out of LA. Welcome to the show.
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Yeah, and I'm excited to talk to you. I'm slightly apprehensive in the sense that, my God, this stuff sucks, but...
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Yes, that's the question for the end of the episode. What are we going to do about all of this shit? But let's go back to sort of the beginning. Can you sort of talk about your first encounter with... I guess at that point, what was a not especially mainstream part of the religious right back around 2018?
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Yeah, and that's really interesting to me, that it's specifically the satanic angle that they're taking, because it's like... In this early enough phase that they're still sort of developing their reasons to be angry. They haven't quite like metastasized transphobia as like they're driving things.
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So they're kind of they're reaching back into this kind of satanic panic era, like the weird 90s and 2000s stuff that like.
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When I was growing up, the town that I grew up was super religious, and, like, you know, we had to have lists of, like, if you were inviting, like, a friend in high school to a party whose parents could know that it was a Halloween party and whose parents couldn't because they would freak out about witches. It's, like, that kind of thing, which, I don't know.
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It feels, like, almost quaint now, even as stuff's escalated, but...
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Yeah. And I think part of the focus on art here, right, is this kind of mirrored reflection of... the sort of, I mean, of the original Nazis, right? Like, one of their big things was just, like, cracked down on quote-unquote degenerate art, and they had, like, these, like, quote-unquote degenerate art festivals of just, like, Jewish artists and people whose art they didn't like.
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And it was, you know, like, a thing that was, like, a significant factor in their rise. And I think there's this sort of mirror of it here, but, I don't know, starting in a weirder place in some ways, like, starting more out of this very, very weird, like... Christian moral panic shit.
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That's, I guess, if you want to look at how this, you know, plays out like that's kind of where it is in like 2018. Right. This is the first bathroom bill has been passed by 2018 with Carolina. But there's you know, there's a huge backlash to it. And that's something that's, I think, very different than now where all of this anti-trans shit is happening and everyone's just kind of going, eh.
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So do you want to talk about the second time that you became a target of the far right?
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Yeah, and that one I think is interesting, too, in the sense of, like, that one's, like, a lot more... It's more overtly trans, and it's also, I think, the more trans you are, the more, like, very obviously trans it is.
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And this is, I guess, something that's very common among trans artists, is this kind of, like, art that's an exploration of sort of body horror and, you know, I mean, I'm not gonna... project onto it.
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I don't know if this is what you specifically are doing, but like, you know, there's a lot of it that's body horror as this sort of metaphor for dysphoria and like as this way of sort of thinking about the things that are happening to your body and things that have been done to your body and the things that you're doing back to it.
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Yeah, and I think there's something about the way that your art works and the way that a lot of queer artists are where there's, you know, and this isn't to say that all queer artists like this, but there's definitely like an edge to it. There's stuff going on. There's body horror things happening. There's, like, 80s aesthetic-y stuff.
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And I think it conflicts with this kind of weird Kincaid, everything is, like, happy and cozy sort of kitsch aesthetic thing that a lot of, like, this kind of fascism is really into. They use a kind of aesthetic sensibility as...
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as a weapon to go after stuff that they oppose for more overtly political reasons, they can do this kind of like, hey, look at this disgusting thing, et cetera, et cetera, kind of attack on queer art as a result of this kind of like fascist kitsch aesthetic thing that's kind of like this, you know, this sort of like cultural norm in our society. And I think...
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I haven't 100% worked out the political implications of this, but I think there's this kind of connection between their weaponization of like revulsion and their weaponization of this reaction to like anything that's kind of like horror-y that they kind of like use as a political attack.
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Yeah, and I think that sort of like fear and that sort of like grinding experience of being forced to like... Perform a gender in a certain way. Well, OK, I'm not going to say perform because the Butler scholars are going to get extremely mad at me.
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But the way in which you're forced to sort of live up to these standards that are sort of nonsense, I think it gets to this thing where, you know, you could either sort of like muddle through it and try to ignore the distance as much as you can. you can attempt to fight it or you can get extremely bad and everyone else is trying to do something about it.
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And I think we're seeing an explosion of the last option. Yeah. Unfortunately, we need to go to ads, which is another thing that drives a whole bunch of this. Luckily, these are audio ads, so hopefully they're not driving beauty standards. But, you know, who knows? Ad people are wizards. They'll find a way.
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And we are back. I mean, I guess the Washington State Highway Patrol does enforce gender norms on people.
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Yeah, it's not great. It's not a good time for anyone involved. Speaking of bad times, this isn't even an ad pivot. I just do this now. It's really bad. I do it to people in my daily life. They're like, why are you ad pivoting me? And I'm like, oh, God. But, yeah, I guess, God, this and the sort of racialization aspect and, I don't know, sort of the aspect of zones of gender performance, like,
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God damn it, I keep saying performance and I literally mean that you were performing it as in you were acting and not the butler thing of your performing it to make it real. Please don't yell at me in the comments. I had the guy who wrote a writer on the Big Bang Theory yelled at me specifically about that on Twitter one time, so now I'm paranoid. Okay, sorry, I'm about to rail this enough.
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Partially because this next part is really depressing, but... So a while back on this show, my co-host Garrison, who is, I don't know, probably having an absolutely terrible time at the Consumer Electronics Show right now, covered a specific far-right panic that became known as the WeSpot controversy. Do you want to talk about how the right stuck you into that shit? Because Jesus Christ.
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Yeah. And I mean, I think the thing that it reminds me the most, something we've also covered on this, this is one of the problems with talking about this. It's like doing this for so long that like there's very few things that I can say that I can't be like I've said this on the show before. But we spent a lot of time, particularly Garrison, spent a lot of time covering this.
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the way that every time there's a mass shooter, the right immediately just, like, picks a random trans person and goes, it was this person.
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And this reminds me a lot of the same thing, although this is a more targeted, like, we've invented a fake controversy about a trans person and then we're going to, like... also just pick a random famous trans, well, not even famous, but like a random trans person that we know about and don't like?
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Yeah, I mean, I think there's an interesting intermediary thing, too, where... So my friend Vicky Osterweil, who, depending on when this episode comes out, you'll be hearing from either right before this episode or right after, had another version of this where she wrote a book called In Defense of Looting.
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It came out in 2020 and just for like three months became, I don't know, three months, maybe like two months, like became the like the giant figure with which everyone who didn't like the uprising was just like taking shit out on. So like sitting congresspeople were denouncing this book that she wrote.
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Every mainstream media outlet specifically had their editorial people going, this book is evil, Vicky is evil. And I think that was also this moment of deep connection between the backlash of the uprisings and the anti-trans uprisings, because the people who are trying to maintain a white supremacist gender system
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intimately themselves, even if they don't understand it on a theoretical level, understand that these things are preserving the same systems of violence. And so they picked us as sort of the wedge point to break this thing apart. And I think with Vicky, they hadn't really figured out how to do it
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And I think it was, like, specifically your case, the Wii Spa, like, with you being put in as a figure of the Wii Spa, is where they, like, actually really figured out how to do the whole thing. And, yeah, there's just something really bleak about both how effective it was and the fact that it's, like, these are just people.
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I don't know, like, this isn't the thing that's happening to sort of, like, abstract figures. It's just, like, yeah, people I'm having conversations with are how they did this. It's just... I don't know. I wish I had more analysis.
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You know, but on the other hand, right, there's this aspect of which, like... you know, there's this transnationalism, but then there's also the experience of being a trans person is like, I too am trying to find a way to not pay rent. Like, that's like, I don't know.
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Yeah. And it's one of these things where like the more of a target on you, the more...
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likely it is to happen and even people who don't have targets on them like I know people you know who've never experienced anything like this and have still just like had attacks on them and it's fucking terrifying it is an absolutely terrible way to have to live in a terrible sort of thing to have to experience especially as it's just getting intensifying
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Yeah, and that's the thing about this status of niche D-tier internet micro-celebrity. I feel like I got the best possible version of it, where I got a job that pays slightly... I think I might have hit... No, I'm still below the median salary of a cis man in the US, but I'm approaching it. Okay. We're getting closer. Every year, every union fight, we approach median cis man salary.
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But, like, yeah, the situation I got is effectively the equivalent of winning the trans lottery, right? Like, this is about the best you could possibly hope for if you're a trans person and you get famous. Like, yeah, I mean, like, I get that threats, too, right? But, like, nothing anywhere near the scale that you get. And mostly what happens is, like...
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I mean, like single digit numbers of trans people in the U.S. have the kind of protection that actual celebrity gives you. And everyone else, celebrity is just another, it's just a giant target painted on you. And yes, you have none of the benefits and all of the sort of, hey, here is 150 million people who absolutely hate you and who have been primed and targeted like specifically at you. Yeah.
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Hopefully. And I think part of this is also like the reason this campaign is happening is because they're trying to stop the tide from coming in. And they saw how far in the tide had already come and now they're trying to like...
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dam off the tide and you know like probably it's not going to work but the only way that it can is if everyone just like sits here does nothing and lets them just keep building and building and building more walls it's something that is within our power to resist we just have to actually do it right you have to actually organize you have to talk to the people around you you have to go get them to do things to resist this
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And if we do, yeah, the things that we've already won, the things that we are going to win are going to stick. But if not, things are going to get really, really bad really quickly. Yeah, and speaking of things getting very bad very quickly, here are some more ads before we get back to things getting worse. We are back. Yeah, you've been specifically targeted by a sitting U.S.
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congresswoman, Nancy Mace, who is the person who... Actually, I don't know if we talked about the bathroom stuff here yet, but she's the sort of person behind an attempt to get trans people to not be able to use the bathroom on Capitol Hill. She's become a leading anti-trans... figure in Congress.
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Literally every single thing that she tweets about is about trans women and how they should be put in men's jails, which is just an incredibly cynical ploy to make a bunch of people get horribly raped and killed, which is one of the predominant things that happens when we get put in men's prisons. And she specifically came after Hughes.
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You want to talk about how that happened and the latest sort of a congresswoman tweets and a fucking social media company does their bidding?
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Yeah, and I think there's a couple of things going on here. One of which is, you know, so we've seen this with Facebook in the last, I guess when this comes out, it'll be like a week ago. But, you know, Facebook has instated policies that allow you to basically say slurs against queer people and allow you to call queer people mental illnesses and stuff like that.
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That's very specifically you can only do to queer people. You can't do it to anyone else. And I think there's this sort of trend here of, I don't know, with Facebook, I wouldn't say that it's like compliance with the sort of new Trump regime, because like this is just who Facebook is. Right. Like they did the Rohingya genocide, like the genocide into gray, too. That was also a Facebook thing.
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So they've always just been evil people. And have been sort of looking for the excuse that they need to, like, drop the hammer on us.
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But I think YouTube, to some extent, too, what we're seeing right now is this kind of, like, mask coming off moment where people are realizing that with Trump in power, they can just drop the hammer on a queer artist because... Specifically, like, on a trans artist because... Now they have this sort of like backing to do this stuff.
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And the right has, you know, realized that they can be like, YouTube, take this video down and they'll do it. And that's a really terrifying precedent in a lot of ways. And also it's very, you know, I was like, yeah, obviously, because appointing a hypocrisy does nothing.
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But like, I'm trying to think of a more explicit demonstration of censorship than a member of the government says that something should be taken down and it's taken down. It's like...
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Yeah, and disappearing people from the mainstream is the first step for how you destroy a people.
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I know that's why she came after my art. There's something just incredibly galling about watching this whole thing happen. And then like the next tweet is again, a sitting member of the U S government saying that trans women should be put in men's prisons. And it's like, okay, one of these is considered violence by sort of the media machine. And one of them isn't.
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You know, these people are not as powerful as they want you to believe, right? A lot of their stuff just fails. But they will only fail if people are willing to resist and people are willing to stop them. And that's the thing that's needed in this moment is organization is...
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You know, like, is organization, it is action, it is now the time to go do whatever political activity thing you've been being like, ah, should I be organizing a union? Should I be, like, setting up strikes? Should I be doing street demonstrations? It's like, yep, it's time. It's time to go, because otherwise, you know, and I think this is something that, like...
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every trans person now understands intimately. And I think most people don't, which is that right now it's us, but you know, in two years, assuming we're all still alive, there's a very good chance that it's going to be you like showing up on this show because a fucking Congress person has deliberately intervened to destroy your life.
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And I would rather we had stopped this before it got to any of us, but they're going to come for you too, unless we stop them. thank you so much for coming on the show and where can people find you and find your art and yeah, support you.
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Hell yeah. We will have links to all of that in the description. So yeah, go check it out and resist the creep of fascism.
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Welcome to Nick and Apid Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. Returned for the holidays, returned rejuvenated, returned refreshed, returned to do something a little bit different. In the coming weeks, we're going to be doing a lot of nitty gritty analysis of the coming wave of fascism. But what we haven't really been...
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doing as much. What I want to take some time to do today is to talk about fascism at a sort of macro level and what it looks like right now and also talk about an extremely cooked guy who blew himself up in a Cybertruck outside of a Trump building.
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And with me to talk about this is writer, organizer, agitator, doer of so many different things that like, I don't know, someone's going to write a great biography in like a hundred years. It is the one and only Vicky Ashtewile.
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Well, I'm glad to have you here. And part part of this, the initial thing that was like, OK, we need to do this was I saw you called all of this the years of lead paint. And that is just it is stuck in my mind every for every single second of every day since then.
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It's kind of an evolution of the like purge the deep state thing where he wants Democrats gone from like the army and right right, you know so it's the kind of more generic version of like the sort of Nazi fantasy of the day of the rope from the Turner Diaries is kind of like Metastasized into all this right-wing culture where they have their own sort of like less race war II or like less anti-semitic Versions of it.
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Yes, and that's apparently what this guy was trying to start off by exactly Blowing himself up with a truck full of fireworks in front of a truck.
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And this is important. You know, I'm not sure there's any capacity drop in the world that is greater than the drop from like Green Beret to like former Green Beret. This guy was active duty.
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Yeah, so I want to start talking about this by getting a little bit into what the years of lead are, because I imagine some of you, like, there's probably, like, I don't know, there's probably several thousand of you who are obsessive nerds about the years of lead and, like, know the name of every single guy who was implicated for these car bombings.
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But for everyone else who's normal, and I count myself among the non-normal people because I spent about two years going down the years of lead rabbit hole and destroyed my brain. Same. But the years of lead were this thing in roughly the 70s and the 80s in Italy, where as a response to the sort of rising power of the left through the 60s and like the giant uprisings, 1968.
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And Italy is kind of different from the rest of Europe because in Italy, you know, like in France, for example, France has this huge uprising in May 68. Like they nearly knock off the government, like workers councils have seized control of the factories. Like they lose a sort of body. There's, you know, the president's like fleeing in a helicopter.
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But then after that, like, they kind of never seriously threatened the French government again. In Italy, that is not true. Like, 68 in Italy, there's a very similar thing going on. But, like, the seizure of the factories has been going on since, like, I mean, stuff like this has been happening since the 50s.
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And it really only stops in 1977 when, like, they have one last big push uprising and it fails. So, as a way to contain this, the Italian government develops this strategy of...
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backing right-wing terror groups and then also orchestrating left-wing terror groups and by terror groups I mean like the most famous thing in this is called the Bologna train bombing 1980 that kills 85 people wounds like 290 like it's a really really horrific attack and it's immediately blamed on an anarchist group turns out it's not an anarchist group it is a state-backed like fascist group and yeah like there are other ones I will pass over to Vicky to talk about like the other thing terrible shit that they did
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Yeah. And there's I mean, there's other stuff, too. We're not going to get into the kidnapping of Aldo Moro here. I've I have explained this on the show at some point. I think it's in I think it's if you go to the Halloween episode we did where we talk about conspiracies, I've explained that whole thing.
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But like the goal of this, right, the reason that, you know, they're they're giving all of these weapons to these like stay behind networks.
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So it's designed to like fight a Soviet invasion and like and having all these bombings was specifically something they call the strategy of tension, which is a strategy of promoting sort of mass violence and promoting terror as a strategy to drive people back towards the state. Because the idea was in this and this seems to have worked.
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You know, you scare people enough by the fact that there's, you know, there's bombs going off all the time. People are getting killed. People are getting kidnapped. There's all of this just like horror happening.
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And the goal is to get people to turn to the state for, you know, sort of order and security and like stop doing all of this uprising stuff because we need, you know, we need to sort of terror to end. And it was extremely effective. And the sort of knowledge of this has, I guess, proliferated through the American left in the last like decade.
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And that has led to a lot of, I think, kind of unhelpful comparisons. You will hear people sometimes talk about like American Gladio, which is Gladio is those to stay behind networks that were armed by the Italian state and used as sort of the basis of these neo-fascist groups. And like, to refer to this sort of like, I don't know, like what's happening in the U.S.
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And that's not really what's happening. And this is where I want to pass it to Vicky to talk about sort of the characteristics of what we're calling the years of lead paint and how they're sort of different from the Italian ones.
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We are back. All right. Years of blood and paint. Let's go.
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Yeah. And also the people who are doing the years of lead are unbelievably cynical about it. Right. Like they don't they don't believe any of this shit. Right. Yes. Yes. No, exactly.
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We're a Second Amendment guys like that stuff is driven a lot by sort of like hardline true believers who aren't trying to sort of like fuel a bunch of mass shooting to push people towards extreme, like increasingly right wing politics. That's sort of like not what they were trying to do. But that's sort of, you know, that's the net effect of a lot of the stuff.
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Which is really funny because for the Freakonomics guy, that is a downright left-wing theory by his standards.
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Yeah, and it's also worth talking about, we'll be covering this on the show at some point in the future when we've had time to go through the documents, but there was recently a massive, from Distributed Denial of Secrets, a massive drop of stuff on the militia movement from a guy who infiltrated it. There's a very good ProPublica story talking about the guy that we'll link in the show notes.
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So the militia movement has survived, but the kind of stuff that we saw in 2017, 2018, 2020 is not...
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Yeah, well, and also, and also we've talked about on this show, the other thing that put an end to that was that the Daily Wire figured out that you could use literally the exact same structure of QAnon, but make it about trans people. Yes. And that has been unbelievably effective.
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Yeah. To do a very specific example, it's like the vibe is like the last games of the Oakland Athletics before they were fucking run out to before for their owner moved into Las Vegas. Exactly. Where like they've had an incredibly disappointing season, like deliberately by the owner who decided to make who made a bad team so people wouldn't fight him, like moving the team to L.A.
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Yeah, and I think that there's been a lot of comparisons to this, to direct McCarthyism. I think that's accurate to some extent. I think the most direct comparison to this is not McCarthyism. It's the Palmer raids. Yep. Which I think people tend to be way less familiar with.
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That was the first Red Scare, which was largely targeted at the industrial workers of the world for their opposition to World War I. And they did basically the same shit. A lot of people would give anti-war speeches and then a whole bunch of IWW organizers and other sort of like leftists would... would get fucking deported for it. So, yeah, that was a absolutely terrifying period of repression.
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If the line is not drawn here, and it should have been drawn, like, 200 miles back from here, but if it isn't drawn here, this is going to continue, this is going to continue to get worse.
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One of the other really core aspects of the profitability of Tesla in terms of selling cars. By the way, we should also mention, this is something Axios talks about, that if they weren't able to sell carbon credits, this company would literally never make money. Yeah, this has been the case.
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Yeah, now that I've gotten one of the two things I've ever wanted in life, play on music.
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So since last week, this has been an entire rollercoaster because right after we finished recording in like the next two days, everyone went, oh, the tariffs aren't going to be that bad because a lot of the tariffs that were hit with Trump's sort of general 25% Canada-Mexico tariff got waived after Trump agreed not to apply them to goods covered by the USMCA free trade agreements. Right.
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But then everyone remembered that the 25% steel and aluminum tariff was still going into effect. And so that went into effect this week. Now, there was also a brief, incredible moment of panic where Trump was talking about doubling them to 50%. He backs off of this in exchange for Ontario's Doug Ford stopping a 25% increase in electricity prices. However, the trade war is 100 percent still on.
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Canada is doing a whole sort of slate of reciprocal tariffs specifically on steel and also tariffs and taxes on a whole suite of other U.S. goods. I'm just going to read this from the Associated Press because this is no longer the trade war here is no longer limited to the U.S., Canada, China and to some extent Mexico. So Mexico's
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really hasn't been responding in the same way as basically every other country who's come under these tariffs, or at least the sort of main focuses of these tariffs. But this week, the EU officially joined the fray. So here's from the AP, quote, Across the Atlantic, the European Union will raise tariffs on American beef, poultry, bourbon, and motorcycles. Bourbon again? Yeah, yeah, bourbon twice.
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Yeah, but even their car sales are enormously bolstered by a $7,500 tax credit for electric cars. Oh, yeah.
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Yes, peanut butter and jeans. Actually, you say this. There was a whole, like, part of the whole speech.
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People in the EU, like, this was part of the thing, was, yeah, like, we're hoping to restore the profitability of the American spirits markets when the U.S. backs down.
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Pretty reasonable. It's also very funny that it was like... Bourbon was like our... What attempt number was it at making whiskey before we finally got one that was like... Exportable? Terrible.
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Yeah, well, and speaking of it being produced in Kentucky, this is actually deliberately... Okay, well... All right, so the EU, in theory, the line that they're saying is that these are deliberately designed to, like, target things that are made in red states. They also did do soybean tariffs, too, though, which is, you know, like... dropping a nuke on Illinois here.
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Okay, so the EU has imposed reciprocal tariffs on $28 billion of U.S. goods. Also, on Tuesday, China's tariffs went into effect, which means the agricultural tariffs that we talked about last week, and notably, I keep coming back to soybeans because soybeans are such a critical part of the system of American agriculture as the crop that you rotate out with corn to sort of preserve soil integrity.
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The Chinese tariffs are now in effect. It's mostly on agricultural goods. Yeah, and this has, I think, in ways that are pretty predictable, at least to me, this has caused a lot of panic in the markets. There's been some sort of rallying as more information comes in. But there's stuff that I did not predict, which is, so, okay, Goldman Sachs has downgraded its projection for U.S. GDP growth.
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Their chief economist is talking about how he thinks we're going to get stagflation again, which is sort of wild. Stagflation was the thing in the 70s that was... You know, like you have inflation and unemployment growth at the same time. This is basically the economic condition that liquidated the welfare state and allowed the right to take power in the first place.
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The things I have to deal with on this job. They didn't warn me. You got your music now. It's true, it's true, it's true. This makes up for a lot.
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It's true. So, okay, now sort of more surprisingly, and this is something I have literally never seen before with the U.S., both Citibank, well, Citibank changed its name to Citi or something, but Citibank and UBS, the giant Swiss bank, downgraded the status of all U.S. equities. I have never seen anything like this in my entire life. They are also boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities.
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So this is basically like, this doesn't have like a technical official effect. But this is, like, this is basically their evaluation of what countries, like, stocks, basically, you should purchase. Right? And this also sort of applies to bonds. So, is that bad? This is, like... I assumed that the U.S. would get its actual credit rating devalued before this happened. This is unreal.
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The argument that they are making here is that it is because of the instability in the U.S., because of the tariffs and because of everything that's going on, that you should just fucking pull your money out of the U.S. and American companies and put it somewhere else. And they're specifically boosting the status of Chinese and EU equities.
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Which is astonishing, because, again, one of the countries, again, whose equity status that they are boosting is China. China's economy is a fucking disaster right now. They're dealing with, like, their fucking housing bubble going under.
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They've been trying to do this pivot to a consumer-based economy for years and years and years and years, and it doesn't work because they don't pay people enough to actually, like, fuel an economy by consumer spending. Like... They're you know, they're about to take giant damage from the trade war.
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And also that like, you know, like it was only like three years ago, the CCP faced their first like nationwide mass protest, like since Tiananmen. Right. And these guys like and again, these are these these are the financial analysts of Citibank and UBS have looked at that and went, you are better off putting your money there than you are putting it in the US.
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I thought you were going to say a burger in Portland does cost $4 trillion. I mean, probably tomorrow, right? Like, who knows? I don't know. If the fucking plagues that we're doing... We're adding levity because this is legitimately kind of frightening. No, like, this is... I have never seen the financial press like this.
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Like, the only times I've ever seen the financial press react to something like this is like... They were kind of acting like this about the possibility of Jeremy Corbyn, like taking power in the UK. Like they are like I watched a guy on CNBC. Right. This is not like this. This is not MSNBC. This is not even like CNN. This is CNBC. Literally go on air and call what Trump is doing, quote, insane.
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And start talking about how – and this is, I think, what these people are worried about is they're – you know, the thing that they're seeing that's starting right now and it's starting with these sort of – with these downgrades of U.S. equities is capital flight, which is straight up like international capital taking their money from the U.S.
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and fucking literally moving out of the country and moving it somewhere else because the U.S. is so unstable. This is I don't know if anyone knows what mass capital flight from the U.S. would do because I've never seen anything like this.
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So part of what's going on right now, part of the reason the markets have kind of recovered in the last few days after the tanking they did Monday is that like the inflation data came out and it wasn't that bad. But the thing is, all of the inflation data we're getting right now and all of the economic indicators we're getting right now.
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It's going to take a little bit of time for the actual effects of these tariffs to set in. Right. Like these are these are things that like, you know, it's going to take it's going to take like six months, maybe a year before we fully see the impacts of that. And but when we do, it is going to fucking blow a smoking crater into the economy.
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And the worst part about this is this isn't even the most unhinged part of this. The most unhinged part of this is how the Republicans have been reacting to all of this in Congress.
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So one of the few things the Democrats have been trying to do, and I say one of the few because like the response has been downright collaborationist, but they've been trying to force Republicans to take a vote on the tariffs because the tariffs are unbelievably unpopular. And they're particularly unbelievably unpopular among, like, the capital-owning class who, you know, actually matter.
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So what they've been trying to do is that Trump did these tariffs by declaring a state of emergency. And the Democrats wanted to use the National Emergencies Act to force a vote on the tariffs. I'm just going to read this from the New York Times.
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The national emergency law lays out a fast track process for Congress to consider a resolution ending a presidential emergency requiring committee consideration within 15 calendar days after one is introduced and a floor vote within three days after that.
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But the language the House Republicans inserted into their measure on Tuesday declared that, quote, each day for the remainder of the 119th Congress shall not constitute a calendar day for the purposes of the emergency that Trump declared on February 1st.
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So the point we are at right now is is in order to preserve a bunch of tariffs which are effectively about to fucking obliterate the entire world economy. Congress has declared that days don't pass. This is fucking this is completely unhinged. This is fucking like Caligula's horse in the Senate ship.
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Like, again, they are literally they have literally declared that calendar days passing are not actually calendar days so that Trump can just keep doing tariff shit and rule by fiat.
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It's it's genuinely astonishing. And the extent to which this has kind of just been swept under the rug, the Republicans have been doing this kind of quietly. Right. And and the fact that like the fact that Democrats are not literally on TV every single second of every day going, the Republicans are voting to stop time so that Trump can destroy the economy is astonishing enough.
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It's this real, like, sort of admission by the Republican Congress that, like, they're ceding authority over policy, like, to Trump completely, right? Like, the government now is Trump ruling by sort of fiat and people attempting to sort of, like, run circles around him in courts, which is not, you know, working enormously well. Yeah, we'll see.
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And, you know, this is starting to have effects on, like, investor confidence, like, in, like, the U.S. as a political entity and the U.S. as an economic entity, which is unprecedented, right? The other thing I think it's worth noting is that these people like Elon Musk, Donald Trump, the people around them have been saying for a long time that the plan is to cause a recession.
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And then after the recession, things are going to get better. And the financial pressures hasn't believed them. And this right now is the period in which they're starting to realize that they were serious about this. And I don't know what the political ramifications of that are going to be because these are people who actually matter in the political system.
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And I think we'll see the ramifications of this play out in the sort of coming weeks and months. But this is a fucking cliff that we've hit. And we're now like Wile E. Coyote, like running off the side and trying not to look down.
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The other really funny one is when they try to attach a winch to it and try to use it to pull... the pull heavy things in the back of the truck comes off because it's just like made of like, it's like secured by like glue. Is it a unibody?
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Yeah, and I mean, like, you know, we've talked about on this show for a long time how eliminating the Department of Education and eventually destroying public education has been a long-running goal of the most absolutely unhinged of these people who are the people now in charge. And, yeah, they've decided to just, like, individually fuck every child in the U.S. It's incredible.
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You get to see all the threads of this admin coming together, right? Which is that, you know, these people are also attempting to effectively destroy, like, the secondary education system in this country, too. For reasons that are sort of unclear to me, I don't know.
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But what we're seeing here, right, is the ways that the Democrats sort of, like, falling into lockstep with the Republicans on backing the genocide in Israel has... sort of led to this thing where the Republicans are using this to just straight up obliterate all of the U.S. 's political, economic, and social institutions.
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I feel like we genuinely are not that far off from just Trump trying to hand down legal mandates saying you must buy a Tesla. This is the kind of shit that we're in now.
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But well, you know, but like part of this is like it's very easy, like especially right now when the IRS is being gutted, like it's very easy to do this kind of bullshit. People are not getting audited.
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Yeah. And it's worth noting. So like Tesla, you'll see a bunch of things about how Tesla is like one of the like best selling car manufacturers. Right. And part of it is from this. But also, you know, and this is this is the other aspect of this. It's worth noting there's a very good Bloomberg article out today by Amanda Mould that talks about how.
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50% of all American consumer spending is now by people in the top 10% of the income bracket. So people make $250,000 a year or more. And that means increasingly that everything in the United States reflects the, you know, the sort of like cultural affect of this.
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these bunch of fucking rich assholes who all also want to buy this for their sort of like like cultural grudges and you know to like to own the libs and like show how like much of a fucking man they are yeah you know and and so you already you have that initial incentive and then you suddenly have all of these fucking tax incentives that you get from buying this vehicle that like definitely this is like designed with the shit in mind yeah without a doubt and it becomes it
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Yeah. Okay, so we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we're going to sort of finish this off with a sort of larger structural analysis of how this version of capitalism created Musk and where it's going. We are back. Now, I think this all, I think if you've been following Elon a lot, you've probably heard of most of this.
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Actually, okay, you've heard of most of what I've said to some extent. I don't think you've heard what James has said before because I've seen very little coverage of this. But there's also something deeper going on here. The deeper thing going on here is that Elon Musk, on a fundamental level, is also a product of the endless bubble economy. That we've all been living in for decades now.
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It's a product of an economic policy that the economist Robert Brenner calls asset Keynesianism. So regular Keynesianism, right, is about, you know, having the government spend money on things like welfare programs and job creation. Also, you know, also like the military, too, right? Like, let's not sort of like sugarcoat it, but.
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It's about using a bunch of state money to like make there be jobs and using this to sort of the way they call it is like counter cyclical spending. But it's like they want to use the state to spend money to make there be jobs and to put money into the economy and to put goods into the economy to counteract economic downturns.
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Asset Keynesianism is still the state expending a bunch of resources, right? But it's the state expending those resources both bureaucratically and in terms of incentives and in terms of sort of tax structures and specifically also very much in terms of the Federal Reserve's interest rates. specifically to increase the price of stocks.
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And also, you know, the reason he calls it assets, right, because it's not just stocks, right? It's also things like real estate. It's to increase the value of speculative assets, things that you buy because you think it's going to be worth more later. I have talked about this a lot on this show. This has been the fundamental...
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global economic strategy of most of the world's economies ever since Japan pioneered it in the 80s after the US kneecapped its entire domestic export manufacturing economy to the Plaza Accords. By the end of this fucking administration, everyone who listens to the show will be able to explain what the Plaza Accords and the reverse Plaza Accords are.
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It can no longer happen here. You'll know the origin of the economy. Yes. So, again, the Plaza Accords, the U.S. forces all of these countries to increase the value of their currencies relative to the dollar. This makes American manufacturing more competitive. It nukes all of their manufacturing. These countries need to find another place to, you know, develop their economy. Right.
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And the thing that the solution Japan comes to is real estate speculation. This blows up. This blows up in the 90s. This is this is a whole bunch of the sort of Asian market collapse stuff is from this. And then the U.S. is forced to do the reverse Plaza Accords in the 90s.
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This is Bill Clinton and, you know, sort of annihilate American manufacturing in order to sort of prop up the rest, like Japanese manufacturing to keep their economy from completely imploding. Japan was the number two economy in the world at that point. But again, this this means that the U.S. has now been doing this.
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There's the famous things called the Greenspan puts were like to try to stop a market collapse that was obviously coming with a tech bubble blew up. Greenspan kept cutting the interest rates over and over again, trying to keep the bubble from collapsing and just making it bigger. And then eventually it blew up. This is what 2008 is was, you know, we did a whole bubble.
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I mean, there's there's there's another bubble and collapse in between there. But like. And this is what we've been doing for the last two decades. Since 2008, we've been creating this giant tech bubble. And this tech bubble shit, this sort of asset speculation, is also a huge part of the value of Tesla stock. It's just people who've been given a whole bunch of access to cheap credit.
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And by people, I mean not really you and me, like a bunch of unbelievably rich people have access to incredibly cheap loans, and they use that money to buy Tesla stock. This is a sort of cyclical thing that just continuously increases the value of the company. And it's not just sort of like banks and investors. A lot of money that goes into Tesla comes in there from state pension funds. Yep.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia. Happy to be here again. Yeah, I am... I don't know. I have mixed emotions about this one.
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From a bunch of a whole bunch of different countries and also like a huge number of American states. Like your teacher's pensions are all tied up in this because pension reform, the way that we sort of like lost the pension as a normal thing.
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was that it was converted to 401ks, and the people who still have regular state pensions, all of that money is now sort of invested in the stock market, and it puts billions of dollars into Tesla every year. And so this is also another aspect. This is the broader structural level on which U.S. macroeconomic policy Yeah. Yeah.
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But there is a third, even deeper level in which we can look at how these cars are actually produced and how these rockets are actually produced. And they're produced by just the incredible exploitation of a huge number of workers. And I think people tend to think about Tesla workers in the US, but there's Tesla workers all over the world. There's a huge gigafactory there.
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In Xinjiang, you know, there's factories all over China. And, you know, these workers everywhere are paid like absolute shit. They work in unbelievably dangerous conditions. And at the end of the day, they get a very small amount of money so that the richest man in the world can get fucking richer every day.
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So today we are talking about how the American state, particularly the sort of neoliberal American state of the last about 50 years, created Elon Musk and how... it is destroying itself. And we'll start with the fun part of this, which is that Tesla stock is down 25% in the last month.
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Yeah, and this is something our standard of living is based off of. But at the end of the day, right, Elon Musk's, all of Elon Musk's profit comes from the fact that the state's monopoly on violence is used to stop all of these people from ever attempting to resist him. It's deployed in order to stop these people from taking back the fucking value that they create.
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Now, unfortunately, all of this sort of neoliberal tinkering we've seen for the last 50 years, right, this attempt to sort of like depoliticize everything and have everything run by neoliberal technocrats and sort of have this sort of like non-politics where you're voting for two parties that are like literally even more the same than they are now.
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This attempt to do things like solve climate change through these promotion of carbon markets and create this sort of like stable, like capitalist hegemony forever, right? has ultimately been self-defeating.
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It's why all attempts to regulate capital inevitably fail, because the functioning of the capitalist system, and particularly the function of the way this version of neoliberalism has worked, has concentrated the most wealth ever held by a single human being into the hands of one guy who was a Nazi.
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And then these people use their wealth to accumulate political power and seize control of the state, dismantling the systems that were meant to regulate them. And you can't solve this problem with regulation. Because again, eventually, they will simply accumulate enough power, retake power, and eliminate the regulations. You can't even solve this problem just by killing them.
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I see people talk about like the killing of billionaires in China as like an example of this. And like, A, that's all political faction land fighting stuff. And B, they'll execute people specifically to sort of appease like the Chinese workers so that they never have to fucking watch the PLA get run out of Shanghai again. Yeah. But the thing is, even if somehow you use the state to just kill them,
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Right. It doesn't work because capitalism will just produce more of these people. If you actually want to stop this, if you want to stop this Elon Musk from destroying the entire country and quite possibly ending all life on Earth by fucking with America's nuclear weapons until there's simply not enough safety mechanisms to stop someone from accidentally sending one off.
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you are going to have to destroy them completely. The permanent base of their power, the power of the oligarch, the power of the billionaire, the power of the dictator must be broken. This tiny group of men cannot, as a class, be allowed to own the stores and factories and fields and hospitals, supply chains that produce everything we need to survive. It must belong to us. We create their wealth.
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The only way to save this world is to take it back." If we want to save democracy, the only way to do it is to extend democracy into the spheres where Elon Musk rules as a tyrant. Democracy must march into the workplace to slay the beast at its lair before the despotism of the workplace consumes our political democracy and leaves us with despotism there too. They must cease to rule.
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They must cease to exist, not as individuals, but as a class. And the only way to do that is by giving control of their power and their property and their wealth to the workers whose subjugation produced all of it in the first place. That is the tax that we have in front of us.
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It's extremely funny. The protests are working. People are like lighting them on cars on fire, literally all over the world. Like there was just a big rash in France the day we're recording this. The pressure is working. He's having a bad time. 25% is just the start. We can get the other 75%. Yeah.
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The challenge that we face is that we face effectively the entire might of the American state, which is one of the most powerful apparatuses of repression that has ever been built.
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Our advantage is that that apparatus of repression is currently being run by Donald Trump and Elon Musk, who are, and I cannot emphasize this enough, maybe the two figures most emblematic of what the historian Mike Duncan, after his extensive study of a whole bunch of revolutions on the Revolutions podcast, concluded to be the great idiots of history who, by their sheer and unmatched ability to make the wrong decision at every single moment, are what makes revolutions possible.
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And if these people are not the great idiots of history that allow us to bring them down and stop them from destroying everything that has ever been in this world that is good, then nothing else is.
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And we have already seen they don't understand how this apparatus works, right? They fired the nuke police by accident.
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Yeah. And the second advantage that we have is that they have set about systematically alienating every single group of people who they would need as their political base. They are pissing off the military. They are pissing off the intelligence services. They are going through and they are systematically pissing off the farm states. Yeah.
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And, you know, like, the farmers obviously do not have that, like, don't fucking matter, but they're pissing off the agribusinesses, they are individually going through and pissing off a whole bunch of the country's scientific resources, they're going through, they're, like, fucking with the Social Security Administration, they're individually going through and pissing off every single group of people on Earth who matter, and people who, like us, under this system, aren't supposed to matter until we fucking do something about it.
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And... You know, the other big thing that we have right now is that he is pissing off massive sections of capital by by actually doing these terrorists, which they didn't think he would do.
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And by pulling apart his base of support and by putting together coalitions of some of these people and not all of them, some of them, some of them, you just need to divide and conquer by getting them out from backing him. Right. Like the whole thing with with the Bolsheviks taking over in the October Revolution was that people just mostly stayed home. Yeah. And that when that was how they won.
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Like, that is largely what we need. We need these people to stay home, but these people can and will, if we have anything to say about it, be fucking driven home, and hopefully we can bury both the gravediggers and the people whose graves they were digging in the same spot in the dustbin of history and never have to deal with these fucking assholes again.
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It's the one line we like to see. However, so we've talked a lot on this show about the things that Elon Musk is doing to the American state and about all of the people who he is harming and the lives he's destroying and the people who are dead because of his actions. Yeah.
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And I think it's worth actually getting into how he was produced and how it came to be that at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto, Marx famously wrote that the bourgeoisie produced their own gravediggers. And, you know, his his his promised like inevitable victory of the proletariat has thus far failed to materialize.
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But neoliberalism and like this specific state seems to have produced their own gravediggers, partially in the form of Trump, but partially in the form of Elon Musk. And it's worth actually going into the story of how specifically this happens.
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And also, I think what neoliberalism is, because this is an important aspect of I think people are kind of aware of the broad outlines of the story of the extent to which, you know, Tesla and SpaceX were built by American subsidies. But it's worth going into some of the some of the more structural elements of how this happened and why.
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So one of the problems that we have here, and I say we have here because this is a problem that Elon Musk has, which is that he simply does not understand what neoliberalism is or how it operates.
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He says a lot of things he doesn't understand. Yeah. And unfortunately, he has inherited like the greatest of all neoliberal states. So the issue here is that Elon Musk thinks that what his own ideology is supposed to be, what neoliberalism is, what is sort of weird libertarianism, whatever you call his sort of ideology. you know, is supposed to be.
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And, you know, like he is just sort of a fascist, but on the other hand, he's a product of this wing of that movement that was created out of, out of the kneeler bull thing about like, ah, you must like decrease the size of the state. You gotta, you gotta eliminate all regulations.
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You have to, you know, keep, keep decreasing the size of the state, keep fire, like, you know, fire all government employees, et cetera, et cetera. And again, this is, I think, largely what a lot of people think neoliberalism is, right? They think it's like, okay, neoliberalism is when the state gets smaller. And this has always been a fucking joke.
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Like, through this entire neoliberal period, the size of the state bureaucracy keeps increasing. And this has always allowed a kind of, like, controlled capitalist opposition to emerge to, you know, when 2008 happens, right? The entire economy collapses, and then out of the woodwork come all of these, like, Rand Paul sort of, like, quote-unquote libertarians who have a lot of sudden...
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interesting ties to a bunch of fascist groups and like all of these uh all these sort of fascist paramilitaries but you know they can come out of the woodwork and say oh the reason that the 2008 collapse happened was because uh there was too much government regulation and this is like sort of what bitcoin is right it's like ah the evils of capitalism are happening because like not enough capitalism
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Yeah, well, it's because like, but like specifically, like the evil entrenched interests have taken over the state. You don't have the power to access the things that they do, which is obviously, you know, like it is obviously true that these people have control of the state and you don't. But this sort of controlled opposition of if you put us in power, we'll eliminate parts of the state.
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We'll get rid of all this regulation that you can suddenly be in power. This has always been a controlled opposition thing, you know, and this is disappears in the form of sort of libertarianism or like on the most extreme end, anarcho-capitalism. Yeah.
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And this is something that the Montpelier Society, which is like the people who basically invented neoliberalism and where all of their academics come from, they still have conferences.
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They've always had a problem with this, where there's always been a branch of anarcho-capitalists there who think the only thing that the state should do is enforce contracts or just that it shouldn't exist and everything should just be brand new. Yeah. And the neoliberals are like, okay, you guys are fucking ridiculous.
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And the reason they think this is that the actual thing that these people believe, and this is something that if you read more Hayek than just like the road to serfdom, right? That's like the stuff for public consumption.
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If you read the stuff that you write for public consumption, if you read sort of like Rokey and you read all of the sort of theorists who develop what becomes the IMF and, you know, you go through all the different schools, what they actually believe is Contra the things that they say were like, oh, markets naturally emerge and the state just like exists to control them.
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What they believe is that you have to use the state specifically to create markets and you have to use the state to discipline workers through just pure violence until they become sort of like good neoliberal market subjects. You go to work, go home, buy things and do nothing else. And the product of this is the 1980s, right?
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It's the replacement of the welfare state, which is the sort of carrot of the system, with just the pure stake of the police baton and the prison system.
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Yeah, yeah. But this and this is very important.
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This never actually decreased the size of the state because what the state you know what it was was it was a shifting of sort of recourses and allocation away from like the state giving you things towards the state, you know, like beating you over the head with a hammer and also insofar as it gives you things making you go through all of these unbelievable bureaucratic hurdles to access whatever sort of like scant welfare policies still exist.
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Yeah, and this is always something that all of these people have supported, right? Now, the other important part for our purposes is the thing I said earlier about the state creating markets. And that's kind of like an abstract thing, right? There are sort of historical examples you can go through to look at what this looks like in a place where there aren't markets.
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But this is something that's very important because a huge amount of what Tesla is, is a direct result of, you know, pure neoliberalism in action, which is the state stepping in to create a market as its way of doing regulation and the way it interacts with the world. And so here we need to get to carbon credits. Now, selling off carbon credits, they're also called regulatory credits.
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Yeah. Actually, it has numbers on this. their numbers are that since 2014, 34% of the total profits of Tesla are from selling these carbon credits.
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So the way the system works is that the EPA sets standards for how much this is like, you know, read the Axios thing too, but like the EPA set standards for how much like CO2 per mile, all of the cars and trucks combined that a car company makes can emit. And, you know, instead of doing the thing where you're like, okay, hey, there's just going to be like a firm cap on these emissions.
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They're like, no, no, no. You know, this is what I say when I say they create a market. So what happens if you go over the cap isn't that like, you know, like people get hauled off to jail or whatever. What happens is that you have to buy someone else's carbon credits. And if you're below the cap, it gives you credits you can sell to other companies. Mm-hmm.
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So what this allows is because Tesla only makes electric cars, right? Their cars produce like zero, basically. They don't have any fossil fuel use at all within their line. Yeah. Yeah. Now, obviously, like, where is, you know, you can ask the question, where is that electricity coming from?
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But, you know, like, but that's what doesn't get factored into it, which is part of the sort of problem with trying to use the state like this to solve. Right. It doesn't look at life cycle. Yeah. Yeah.
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you know, this is the problem with trying to use a regulatory state like this to solve the problem of climate change by creating a market. And so Tesla makes, and again, this last year, this was 43% of its net income came not from selling cars, but from selling these carbon credits.
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So what they're doing is making it so that other companies can produce more cars that are less fuel efficient, can produce less electric cars and produce less like hybrids. Yeah. It's why you couldn't get
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Yeah. And this is a fucking disaster for climate policy because instead of having all of the car companies just like dramatically lowering their emissions, what you have is one car company that makes electric cars and then all the rest of the car companies increasing the amount of like CO2 per like miles, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah.
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And the secondary problem, and this is the problem that we're experiencing now, is that, you know, neoliberals have like this very sort of, in a lot of ways, like romantic notion of what a market is, right? When they explain it, it's like, ah, there's going to be all this like competition in the market. The competition is going to create the best product.
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And what actually happens, and the neoliberals in their private doctrine understand this, is that when the state creates a market like this, what it's doing is handing like a person, like a single individual, a giant monopoly.
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And that's what happens. And that monopoly is one Elon Musk who has now been handed the title of the richest man in human history by the state's regulatory apparatus.
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Yeah. And again, this is, you know, going back to the market creation part of this. None of this shit existed. Right. Like carbon caps are not something the market would ever produce by itself or whatever. Like this is a direct neoliberal intervention into the market, which is what neoliberalism is. Right. It's the neoliberal state coming in to create markets. And the product of it is Elon Musk.
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Yeah. And when we come back from ads, we'll go into a little bit of why specifically it was Elon Musk and not all of these other companies that became the sort of single guy and how and how else he's benefited from the state. We are back. So the other aspect, you know, so we've gone into how Tesla is built on this carbon credit trading.
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The other aspect of it is that Tesla has received unbelievable amounts of money from government contracts. The Washington Post, in probably the last, like, expose they're ever going to do like this now that Bezos has been like, we are free market capitalists, like, tried to go through and find all of the money in government contracts that they've gotten. They totaled it.
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Well, I think they're also including, like, tax credits and stuff like that. But they totaled it at $38 billion. Wow. And that's just the ones that are unclassified, which is very important because a bunch of what SpaceX does, SpaceX is, you know, most other company, is a bunch of contracts for classified, like, the deployment of spy satellites. So it's definitely way more than that, right? Yeah.
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But this comes to the other sort of aspect of how Tesla functions and how tech companies work in general, which is that tech companies... like in general, do not make money, right? They hemorrhage money for basically their entire existence until they can find a bunch of government contracts that can make them money. And Tesla in particular was like really sort of eating shit after 2008.
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And, you know, WAPO talks about this. They got a $465 million low interest loan from the Department of Energy in 2010 that basically saved the company from the brink of collapse.
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No, no, there was no attempt to build like a giant American high-speed rail system that Elon Musk also killed. Yep. You know, nothing else was happening.
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Yeah. Thank you, Obama. And so as this goes on, right, the goal of you as a tech company, there's two things you want to do. If you're a smaller tech company, you're trying to get bought by a bigger tech company so you can retire on your pile of money. Or if you're a larger tech company, you are trying to amass enough U.S. contracts, like U.S. government contracts to like –
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get you to sort of stability. And this is what happens with SpaceX. SpaceX now has gotten $18 billion of contracts with NASA. And this is sort of a part of like, I mean, NASA has always used government contractors, but like this is different. Like this is just straight up. They are using Tesla's rockets to do things.
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I feel like we should mention up top. There's also a bunch of unhinged tariff news and the most like electing fucking Caligula's horse to the Senate thing I've seen in a long time. So stay tuned for that. Lots of good stuff.
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And this is also part of why like Tesla and Boeing fucking this up is part of why a bunch of astronauts are fucking stranded on the space station right now, because these things do not work. But there's been an enormous amount of money here.
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And the other thing, you know, this is one of the other sort of like great neoliberal things is that a lot of the factories that Elon Musk sort of builds, you know, the ones that are in the U.S. are there because they get unbelievable amounts of tax breaks and tax incentives from local states themselves. All of this brings us to...
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Because the thing that's important to remember about Tiananmen is that contra both sort of liberal histories of Tiananmen and also the sort of CCP line, most of the people who died at Tiananmen were workers, right? Most people who were executed afterwards were workers. They were like students died, but it was mostly workers who were killed.
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Yeah, all right. Let's talk about Trump potentially crashing the entire world economy. He's taking more shots to just literally blow this all up. Yeah, okay, so let's talk about the treasuries thing and him potentially talking about not paying out our fucking treasury bonds. Okay, so let me read some quotes from Reuters. So this is Trump. We're even looking at treasuries, Trump said.
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There could be a problem. You've been reading about that with treasuries, and that could be an interesting problem. Now, treasuries, again, are, of course, U.S. Treasury bonds. We will get to what those are in a second, but I need to read the rest of this. It could be that a lot of those things don't count. In other words, that some of the stuff that we're finding is very fraudulent.
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Therefore, maybe we have less debt than we thought.
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Yeah. And I want to read this next line because one of the things that's happening here, right, is that People just simply, and this has been a real problem for this entire administration, people simply do not believe that he means to do the thing he says he's going to do, right? Quote, this is from Reuters again.
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And a lot of what happened there was that, you know, Tiananmen was like the last time that China's like trade union federation, which is like now such a joke that it's like it's genuinely a subject of academic debate and discussion as to whether you can even literally consider it a trade union. That's that's how fucked it is.
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It could be treasury payments, which is not linked to treasury bonds, said Krishap Bahani, investment chief for Asia BNP Paribas Wealth Management. I would be very surprised if they ever stopped a payment of treasury bonds to a holder. It would be like shooting yourself in the foot, he said.
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Now, this is something where these institutional investors, like, they still have not quite wrapped their head around the fact that, no, he really will do this shit because he doesn't understand at all. He thinks that American debt works the same way as, like, his own personal debt. And no, it doesn't. I mean, it's worth saying some bit.
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So, I mean, just a very, very basic shit about how national debt works, right? Like, all of our money... Literally every single dollar that is in circulation, every dollar that is in a bank account, that is literally government debt, right? Like that's what money is, right? And these treasury bonds are, as we were talking about earlier, right?
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This is like the investment asset for literally the entire world. And there's trillions of dollars of these. Actually, Japan is the largest holder of treasury bonds. China's sort of been selling some of theirs, but they have a lot of them. Yeah, probably good to be doing that. Yeah. And it's also, you know, like the fact that he's saying he's not going to pay these. Yeah.
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Like this can start a massive crisis in which I've been talking for a bit about, you know, every day we sort of get closer to credit rating agencies like downgrading the quality of U.S. debt, which is a real problem for U.S. trying to like get money from people. And, you know, even if you listen to what that what the sort of bond analyst is saying, right, he's like, well, it's fine.
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They'll just stop paying like U.S. debt to other things, which is like unbelievably unhinged would also in and of itself, like destroying the full faith and credit of the United States would absolutely just fucking annihilate the world economy. And it's also another example of Trump not understanding how the empire he's inherited works because, like, one of the ways the U.S.
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funds its government is by getting its client states to buy, like, trillions of dollars of assets. Like, that's partially why, if you look at who buys U.S. assets, like, it's China and U.S. tributary states, like Japan, for example, which is just purely an American military protectorate. Right. It's it's it's sort of incredible system for the US. Right.
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You get a bunch of people and you you know, you just you just sort of perpetually keep borrowing money from them. And it's this thing where they don't understand who actually holds the power in the relationship, which is that the US having all this debt is the one with the power and is the one that's getting everyone else's money. for this sort of secure asset.
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So, you know, who knows what's going to happen with this. If this actually starts happening, like, yeah, this is world-rending economic crisis levels of stuff. We'll see if he moves on it. He may simply forget about it, or we're going to wake up one day and, like, the U.S. 's credit's going to be downgraded to, like, junk bond status, and everything's going to be chaos.
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And the last time that that Chinese trade unions took a political stand was in favor of the Tiananmen protests. And then the army shows up and just like like slaughters their base. Yeah. And what this does is it breaks the old Chinese working class. Right. It breaks the alliance with the students that they'd had.
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So speaking of Trump trying to sort of, like, take shots at pillars of the global economy, Starting in March, he's trying to implement a 25% tariff on all imported steel and aluminum. Most of that's actually from Canada and Mexico. I think in their minds, this is the thing about Chinese steel, but it's mostly from Canada and Mexico. This is also a fucking shit show because the U.S.
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manufacturing capacity that we still have, and we still actually do have a decent amount of very high-tech manufacturing capacity, relies on this stuff, and this is going to make it more expensive. It's bad. It will do nothing to deal with the fact that it doesn't produce steel anymore, which is the product of... One day I'll do my structural Chinese steel overcapacity episode.
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But it's the product of half a century of the global manufacturing economy becoming zero-sum, and there simply not being a large enough consumer market for all of industrial goods, which means the production becomes increasingly... You know, it becomes impossible to expand production in one place without, you know, getting rid of production in another place.
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And Trump thinks you can solve those with tariffs. You can't. Mostly it's just another, like, throw things at the economy shit. Now, you know, Trump is sort of throwing bombs at the economic system. One of the largest ones that he's thrown... He just straight up stole $80 million in FEMA funding that they had already paid out.
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Like, just straight up stole it from, like, a New York City bank account. So, he'd been paid to the government in New York, right? This happened earlier today, right? Yeah, literally, literally. This is breaking news. Breaking news on Wednesday. This is coming out Friday. This episode is being recorded on Wednesday.
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Everything that you hear, if shit has happened in the last few days, that's from the future. We didn't know. But, yeah, yeah. He literally, like, they have... taken 80 million dollars just from this bank account they just stole it the u.s federal government is just straight up robbing banks it's okay that came out today and said that don't worry your bank accounts are still safe everybody
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Funds that were approved by Congress for this specific purpose, right? Yeah, and what's actually going to happen with this, right? Because you would expect, even like a normal, shitty... mayor of New York to like go sick on mode. However, comma, here's some Yahoo news. Quote, Eric Adams has said he will not publicly criticize Trump or his administration.
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Instead, he'll take his concerns to Trump in private. On Monday, Adams convened a meeting with his own top officials to urge them not to speak badly about the president in public, saying if they were to do so, it could risk federal funding.
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Later that day, that same day, Trump's Justice Department ordered the prosecutors in Adams' criminal case to drop the charges against him, in part arguing Adams must be free of the burden of his corruption indictment to help carry out Trump's immigration agenda in the city. Great. Cool.
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That was, you know, and that was a durable political force dating back to like the 1920s. Right. Yeah. And it breaks this extremely militant, well-organized Chinese urban working class and replaces them with a more exploitable and less organized like migrant working class.
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Yeah. The only way they can go further than this is that Eric Adams is going to appoint Rob Blagojevich his head of, like, bank robbery or something. One can dream, Mia. One can dream.
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Well, on the corruption index. On the corruption index. Okay.
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And that is the class that like to this day right now is like the engine of global capital are like those like 300 million migrant workers.
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By the way, the 300 million number, that's just the migrant workers in China. Jesus. To be clear. There are a lot more internationally. China's migrant worker population is almost the size of the US. It's like the fourth largest country in the world just by itself.
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trying to spell these words with like a different letters talking about cute little boots or whatever it is and like i'm laughing because it's all like absurd and that's kind of like kind of like a coping mechanism but like this is all like very bad well but like like hold on there's something else there's something else we need to talk about too which is like like you are required by law as part of your grant proposal like have things that talk about like how this is going to affect different communities etc etc is a legal requirement for you to put that in your thing so like
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If you were to strictly enforce this, this kills every fucking grant. And this is one of these things where it's like, you're literally just running straight into... The federal law tells you you must do this thing, and the Trump administration says these words are banned. So, like, who knows?
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I think it's also worth noting, too, that the other thing that this mirrors, specifically in the way that this targets queer people, is the Lavender Scare, which is a thing from the late 40s through the 60s where the US, as part of this giant anti-communist purge it was on, basically went through and found every gay government official and fucking ran them out.
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that's like another aspect of this whole thing, right? Like the way these people understand the world in order to sort of like purify their like white state, right? Like you have to get rid of the non-white people and you have to get rid of the queers and, you know, and people, especially people who are fucking both. And so this is this sort of transformational project of, of,
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changing this this sort of like just changing the composition of what the u.s is into like and how how its state functions and how they can to what like what level of violence they can bring about on people
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Yeah. And those workers are the basis of modern global capitalism. Right. Like, you know, like those Chinese workers, for example, like it is it is illegal for them to form an independent union. If you try to form an independent union, you will go to prison so fast that like the dust clouds like Wile E. Coyote will take you to prison.
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Yeah, and I think it gets to what this is actually about. And this is something that I would argue both Trump administrations were about, right? If you look at when Trump comes down the fucking elevator for the first time. So I think people may remember, after Ferguson in 2015, there was Baltimore, where there was huge riots, massive confrontations with the police, massive anti-racist actions.
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And that's the thing that really, truly tipped like a bunch of the Republican Party even further right from where they'd been with the Tea Party into this sort of Trumpism. It was, you know, it was a reaction to that. And then this entire campaign, right? Like all of the stuff that he's talking about here, you know, this is about 2020, right?
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This is about reversing the gains that have been, you know, and like, obviously there were incomplete gains. One of the things that did happen was that a bunch of teachers were, were trying to change the way the U.S. history is taught to reflect. That this country was, again, a settler colonial empire built by slave labor. And that expanded its territory through genocide.
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This is just objectively true about how the U.S. started. But the thing is, that's not good for these people's projects, right? Saying that out loud is a fucking issue for them.
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And so, you know, their attempt to roll back everything that was gained from sort of the black uprisings is culminating all of this shit with, like, the purge of black workers from the federal government with all of these things ordering you to, like, that's why they're talking about all of these weird, they keep banning all of these weird, like, terms that don't make any sense.
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Like, they're talking about, like, empathy, right? It's like, okay, so why the fuck are they talking about banning empathy? Yeah, because specifically these things come from the purges they've been trying to do in the education system where they have a bunch of
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very specific grievances about like kinds of education stuff that teachers, that teachers were implementing, like particularly in sort of like middle and high schools.
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Yeah, like, even trying to get your union to, like, do something, like, trying to have your own independent people elected to that union, like, can and will get you arrested. And, like, and even, like, sort of Chinese labor oppression, like, is pretty intense, but it's, like, you know, we're also talking about countries like Colombia.
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It's, like, well, yeah, okay, so what happens to union organizers in Colombia? It's, like, they get shot by paramilitaries with machine guns, right? Yeah. And that's what the sort of spatial fix was, right, was moving jobs to places where the ruling class's sort of control was more firm and their ability to use violence was higher.
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And so this is what the American imperial system sort of had been, right? It's based on American capital flowing around the world. And this is also like international capital too, right? Like we've literally been talking about like Japanese corporations, right? Doing like the same shit, right?
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But you know, it's like international capital flowing around the world, extracting resources and labor from other countries and accumulating it in American corporations. Like that's what free trade is. Yeah. And it's also, you know, secondarily, right? It is a debt system. It's based on forcing countries to like pay back loans that were taken out by dictators.
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Go read Graeber's debt last 5,000 years. It's very good. But yeah, it's based on like turning entire countries into just debt servicing engines where like all of the wealth that is produced by the entire nation is just going to like pay debts to Bank of America. Yeah. And, you know, the thing about this is that this is actually a very, very efficient model of empire.
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It's one of the most sophisticated imperial systems that the world has ever seen. Right. It works extremely well. It makes the U.S. an unbelievable amount of money. It protects global capitalism and the people currently running it don't want it to work like that. Now, do you know who else doesn't want the current system to work like it does because they can make more money? I can guess.
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It's the products and services that support this podcast.
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We are back. So we've entered, I guess, what you could call the phase of mask-off imperialism. U.S. imperialism usually at least sort of, like, wore a human face, and it did it for good reason, right? You know, Ronald Reagan did not give a single shit about democracy and human rights, right? Like, you know, and this has been true of the U.S. for, like, ages and ages and ages, right?
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You know, like, they prop up right-wing military dictatorships constantly, right? But the thing is, democracy and human rights are things that, like, people like. Yeah. And so, you know, it's a weapon that he and his sort of brand of conservatives, like anti-communist conservatives, like, wielded against communism. And it was a very, very powerful ideological weapon because if your choice...
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ceases to be between, like, communism and capitalism and your choices now between, like, do you want to live in a dictatorship or do you want to live in a democracy? Like, that's a very different question. And it's a very, very important question for sort of how the Cold War was won and how international power is wielded, right?
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Because there's always been an illusion that there's an international community and that countries are, like, working together. And this is a very, very powerful question.
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ideological thing you know i mean then this is something like you lived through this like probably listeners who didn't live through this now dear god but like like the iraq war right the u.s didn't unilaterally invade iraq now it was called the quote-unquote coalition of the wielding and included like like they they dragged australia in the war by threatening to like destroy their like milk shipping contracts with the iraqi government like so you know like
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Yeah, and this is the way that you do, even just overtly straight up imperialist stuff, like invading Iraq, right, was still done under the auspices of multinational coalitions. Yeah. And the thing that's different about Trump is Trump doesn't give a fuck about any of that, right? Absolutely not. He has turned on Rob Ford, a man who boldly answers the question, what if Trump smoked crack?
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That is Rob Ford. He's turning on his allies, right-wingers who should be his allies in Canada, who are exactly the kind of people who you would expect to do sort of like right wing multilateral interventions in countries. Right. Yeah. And, you know, he has caused with with his like threat to put tariffs on, like he's causing people to become anti-American. And this is the same thing with Mexico.
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Right. Even the sort of like the nominally center left governments in Mexico like have cooperated with American imperialism. But Trump doesn't want to fucking do that anymore. He wants to run everything just very purely and very openly as as an American empire.
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Yeah. Yeah, because Trump is trying to take the Panama Canal back. And before we get into like, you know, I guess we can get into here some of the stuff that he's doing, right? He's pulled out of the International Criminal Court and is putting sanctions on it. He has been trying to use the sanctions that he's been threatening to apply to Canada to get Canada to join the US.
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Yeah, he's been trying to force the government of Denmark to buy Greenland. Sell Greenland, right? Like he wants to purchase Greenland from them. Yeah, he wants to buy Greenland. There was the whole sort of showdown with Colombia over Colombia's like being pissed off about the treatment of deportees to Colombia. And he used sanctions there. There is, again, him saying the U.S.
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is going to take over Gaza. And this is a very, very substantively different thing than the kind of American empire that we've had before, right? Yeah. The last time the US tried to take Canada was 1812, right? It's been like 200 years. This is how Britain returns to the world stage. Right? And the thing is, the last time the U.S. tried to take Canada, they burned the capital down.
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So, like, you know, this is something that even under, like, people like Bush, right, who is like, Bush is like a very, very overt American imperialist, right? Yeah. Bush would never try to invade Canada. Like, yeah, no, absolutely not. Yeah, that's completely unhinged, right? And this is just a very, very different kind of imperialism than what's existed before.
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And I wanted to go into, I think, why this is the case. Yeah. And I think the reason why this is the case, okay, so the reason that there's been such a defensive free trade is like people being like, oh, my God, if he puts tariffs in place, it'll raise prices. And like, yeah, that's true, right?
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It'll crash the global economy because the global economy has been turned into a very, very efficient engine of extracting profit from countries and putting them in the hands of corporations, right? It's working exactly how Trump wants it to work. Now, if the U.S. wants to rebuild a manufacturing economy, that is technically possible. Right. Reagan was able to do this.
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But what Reagan did instead of doing tariffs is that, well, I mean, kind of, but like the main thing that he did was this thing called the Plaza Accords. And the Plaza Accords was this this thing he did in the 80s where he forced Japan. Japan was the important one, but like Japan, West Germany, I think there are a couple other countries.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and them continuing to fall apart. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. Hi, Mia.
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He forced them to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar. Because if you have a currency and it's worth a bunch of another person's currency, so you have the dollar and it's worth a million yen or whatever the fuck, the currency that's worth less has a more competitive manufacturing economy.
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And Reagan was able to like restart the American manufacturing economy for a while by doing this. But the problem is that it blew up the entire world economy. And so to save the world economy, Clinton rolled back the accords. And, you know, and that was the thing that actually finally sort of like eviscerated American manufacturing.
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And the exchange here was, you know, all the stuff that I've been I've been talking about for the last few minutes. So there's a very, very good essay written right after 2008 called What's Good for Goldman Sachs is Good for America by the economist Robert Brenner. And what the strategy became, and this is a strategy that was originally pioneered by Japan that we took,
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was instead of having like a manufacturing economy, like a production-based economy, you have an economy based on the value of assets, right? So assets are things that you own, right? This is stocks, bonds, like real estate, which is important for our purposes. And the goal is to make the value of those things go up, right?
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And so what you do is you speculate on, you take out loans, you speculate on the prices of stocks going up, the prices of...
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houses going up right and and you know you make it very easy to borrow money yeah now obviously this produced a series of like staggering economic collapses including like the dot-com collapse uh 2008 was yeah you know remember that one but the thing is in the wake of the financial collapse the u.s mostly figured out how to sort of stabilize the system but the thing is you know they they were sort of able to stabilize the system economically right
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What they couldn't stabilize was the political sector, where if you look at the two people who are currently running the United States, it is Elon Musk, who is the human personification of the stock price goes up bubble economy. Right. And the other one is Donald Trump, who is the human manifestation of the real estate class. Right. Who's who's wealth like enormously.
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Yeah, so before we start talking about imperialism, we're starting every fucking episode with this until you people stop, until you stop doing this. It is the year 2025. We are a quarter of a century away. into this millennia, and people are still getting kettled by cops on bridges. They did this in Occupy in 2011. They did it in 2018 during the Occupy ICE protest. People did it in 2020.
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And the thing is, right, because Elon Musk is like a tech bubble go up guy. Right. Those people don't think like the people who built tech. like American financial capitalists, right? Like the people who designed the trade system. They don't think the same way Trump does. Trump is a fucking real estate guy, right? And this is how he sees the world, right?
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He thinks in terms of land and borders and territorial control, and he thinks in terms of like, what physical thing can I steal from someone in order to make money, right? And that, you know, this is why he's trying to like steal the Panama Canal. And he thinks this way instead of things that are more abstract, like debt servicing and the lines of power in the coalition building.
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He looks at a map of Greenland and goes, this looks really big, I want it. And now he's going to try to use the American Empire to just seize this.
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Yes, yes. No, we're back in pure hard power. And something I think is very alarming that I want to close on is the extent to which the US media just wants to do propaganda for it. I'm going to read a quote from a CNN article. Again, this is CNN. Quote, the subject heading is, the US has been expanding for its entire history. This is an article...
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The title of which is Trump wants to redraw the map of the Western Hemisphere.
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Literally, literally. Okay, okay. You are so far ahead of this thing because the next, I'm going to read the one I was going to read first.
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The next section heading is, and I quote, what is Trump's doctrine and explains the Monroe Doctrine?
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That's not even the worst part about it. Like, I'm going to read the section. So one of the other section headings is the U.S. has been expanding for its entire history. Sick. Quote, expansion. Expansion is built into the American DNA since retired Ambassador Gordon Gray, now a professor of practice at George Washington University and former Foreign Service career officer.
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yeah it's you know and this this is all sort of coming into like the way that trump thinks about which trump thinks about the u.s like like an 18th century land empire yeah right yeah yeah 18th century land empires you know got money by conquering people and like extracting tribute from them directly and then also you know they were mercantilist empires right so they they got they got a bunch of their money and this is something that trump explicitly talks about he's like he wants he thinks he can raise revenue from like terrorists which like no he can't but like
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What it can do is use the threat of tariffs to like force countries to do whatever the fuck he wants. And this is the kind of imperialism that we're in now. It is a definite substantive break from what we've seen in the US for a century, more than a century. Yeah. And I think it's important for people to understand exactly how this functions. Yeah. And yeah.
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Yeah. It's great. This is what could happen here. Do not get kettled on bridges. Go out into the world and make trouble.
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Yeah, yeah. I would also recommend David Graeber's Direct Action and Ethnography, which is him writing about the original, like, anti, like, ultra-globalization protests and his, like, time in them.
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People did it last year during the Palestine encampments. People are doing it again this year. Simply do not lead a march onto a bridge.
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So, you know, if you need direct action ideas, they did some fun stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Dressing guys up like marshmallows so police batons would bounce off of them.
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Yes, don't do the tunnel either. Yeah, if there's no side exits, just don't. Yes, here's the thing. The moment you walk onto a bridge, all the cops have to do is take both exits and everyone on the bridge gets arrested. You can simply not do this. If you must do it, you need to, like, make 1,000% sure you can hold both sides of the bridge. Yeah. Both of them. You need to hold both of them. Yeah.
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And almost certainly you can't. So only you, only you... Dear listener, can prevent 4,000 more people from getting kettled on bridges. And I'm going to keep starting episodes talking about don't get kettled on bridges until this stops. All right. This has been Mia's public service announcement about bridge kettling. Let's get into the nature of imperialism and why Trump's is different.
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So we've been covering a lot of Trump's sort of, I don't know, the trade wars, his call for the U.S. to seize the Gaza Strip, a whole bunch of stories about the way that Trump is using the power of the American state to do imperialism. And I think it's worth actually taking a second to unpack this because things are probably going to get worse.
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There is a non-zero chance that we effectively start a war with Mexico in the next few months. Yeah, it's great.
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Yeah, but I want to start with talking about the way that Trump has been using tariffs as a sort of political weapon and not as an economic tool, but very, very specifically as a political weapon and how this differs from the previous economic regime. Because I think there's been a lot of, you know, as the tariffs, the threat of tariffs go up and the markets sort of tank in fear of them.
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There's been a lot of sort of defense of free trade in ways where I don't think people actually understand what's happening. And to understand how what Trump is doing is different from the stuff that's come before, we need to actually understand what trade is. Now, when an economist talks about trade, they go, oh yeah, obviously trade is when two countries exchange a thing, right?
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But that's not actually what most of the stuff on Earth that is labeled as global trade, that's not what it is, right? Look at like U.S.-Mexico trade. We're going to go a bit more into detail about what that stuff is. But do you know what most, not most, but do you know what a huge portion of U.S.-Mexico trade is?
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It is the same company, the same company moving an auto part from one side of the border to the other side. Back and forth across the border.
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Yes. Back and forth. Right. So it's a lot of different people being paid different wages to make the same thing.
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Yeah, and this is actually a real substantive problem with the way that everyone thinks about trade. Because what is happening here, and this is an argument that the anti-globalization movement used to make. You know, David Graeber makes this argument a lot.
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And they're right, which is that most things that we think of as quote-unquote global trade are just a single corporation moving a resource around the world so that they can produce something.
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Yeah, exactly. You know, and this means that using nation states as a way to understand trade is an absolutely terrible way to think about the global economy, right?
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There are some things we're thinking about specifically nation state trade, like trade is important because, you know, even the same corporation moving goods around, right, that does contribute to how much foreign currency a country has, right? So, okay, there's things like balance of payments where...
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If you're a country and you run out of American dollars, suddenly you can't import fuel anymore and your country explodes. And that's a very common way that this happens in Sri Lanka, for example, pretty recently. This is a way for your economy to blow up. But that's kind of an edge case in terms of how global trade actually operates.
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But the problem is that it is to the advantage of the ruling class for you and everyone else to think about trade as something that's like a war between you and the country next to you instead of a corporation like fucking over everyone involved in this entire thing.
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Now, there's a pretty interesting book that I read recently called Border Economies, Cities Bridging the U.S.-Mexico Divide by James Gerber. Gerber? James Gerber. And one of the things he points out is that the two largest trade relations between any two countries on Earth are the U.S. and Mexico and the U.S. and Canada.
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And those are the countries with the highest tariffs that Trump was attempting to apply. And it's worth actually understanding what this does by looking at what actually is traded between, for example, the U.S. and Mexico. And the place I want to start is that one of the largest kinds of goods that is moved from Mexico to the U.S. is computer equipment. And nobody fucking talks about this ever.
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No one. Like, zero fucking people talk about this. I am convinced this is because of racism. But Mexico is a huge sort of, like, assembly... place for a whole bunch of things like monitors, screens, like computer equipment in general. And a lot of that stuff comes into the U.S.
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And there's also, you know, the thing that we started this episode on, that's I think the thing that gets talked about the most now is transportation equipment, right? And this is a combination of consumer vehicles, And also, like, heavy-duty cargo trucks, which are unbelievably important for the maintenance of the American economy, right? Of the entire global economy.
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Having these trucks is a sort of vital infrastructure thing for the United States. You can move stuff around. A lot of that comes to Mexico. And then also, like, a lot of it is, like, whole cars that are, like, finished assembly, like, in Mexico, and they get shipped across the border, right? There's a lot of... Things there.
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And these are also like all the same international car companies that work in the US. So it's like Toyota, it's like Honda.
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Or like... Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ford does this too. Yeah. What's GM now? Stolaris?
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Yeah. And what this is, right, like this is multinational capitalist companies who are moving their products across the border. And this gets counted as Mexico doing trade. You know, one of the things in one of the questions in this book is about why Mexico's economy never had the kind of economic bump that China did from from the amount of. industrial production.
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If you look at like the East Asian tigers, right. Right. And I think part of that is actually something that is not mentioned in the book, which is if you, if you look at the East Asian economies that, that developed their economies, they talk like, say your South Korea's et cetera, et cetera. Like a lot of those countries like Japan, there was a lot of us military investment there.
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in a way that's just not true of Mexico. Like Mexico is not like a place where you, you offshore, you're supplying your supplies to, because you need to move stuff to, you know, fight the war in Vietnam. But, you know, one of the other reasons is that, yeah. Okay. So like, where is all the profit from the international trade going?
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It's like, well, it's going to a bunch of American and Japanese car companies. Yeah. Because it's, it's those, those multinationals are the people who actually reap all of the benefits.
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yeah what the free trade is going for yeah yeah and you know and this is another old anti-globalization thing like river talks about this is like yeah free like free trade is about the free movement of capital and the unfree movement of people right yeah so it's about locking people down in place so you can like you can you can dictate wages to them and then moving capital around the world to avoid them exactly yeah yeah
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And we're going to get into this more in a second, but I want to talk about some of the other things that are exported from Mexico. Fruits, vegetables, alcohol are like huge exports.
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And then also, and this is something that I don't think is... People don't understand what's happening very well, is there's a lot of oil from Mexico that's shipped to the US. But the thing that's happening there, and this is the thing that's very weird about the oil industry, is that... The refinery facilities are not in the same country as the extraction facilities a lot of the time.
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So this oil is getting shipped around because they don't have the refinery facilities to like refine the specific kind of like crude oil or whatever that they're extracting. So like, yeah, it's again, one of these situations where it's not really like Mexico is sending its oil to the US. It's like, I mean, kind of right. That's like one of the more direct ish.
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But largely what's happening is that, again, it's an oil company moving stuff around to do refinement of it so they can sell it. Now, there's been some other stuff happening with Mexico that's a kind of reaction to Trump's previous thing. And I think the extent of this has been overblown to some extent, but... A lot of very low-end manufacturing stuff has been leaving China for a long time.
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This is one of my media things on this show, is that this has been happening for a while because labor prices have been rising in China. And one of the places that these things went to is Mexico. So there's been a lot of direct investment from China, etc., etc.
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And all of these things, these kind of movements, I'm talking about them because these kind of seismic global economic shifts of the kind that we're going to see are driven by... A lot of things, you know, I mean, stuff like currency valuations, like local tax laws, like state and corporate planning policies, like demand searches, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
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But one of the single most important things is the state of class struggle in a country and what effect it has on wages or like, you know, like straight up uprisings, right? Yeah. The geographer, David Harvey, he gets credit for popularizing the term the spatial fix, although other people were already using it and I don't like his work much, but he did. He is the guy who gets credited with this.
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He describes, you know, the sort of free trade regime that persisted roughly through like, nah, I mean, it was taking shape in sort of the 80s, like the 80s through like roughly now as the spatial fix for declining profitability, right? You know what else has declining profitability? Yeah.
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We are back. Okay, so let's talk about this sort of declining profitability and the fix that capitalism sort of finds for this, right? You know, through the 70s, there's this sort of spiraling unemployment and inflation and the economy is sort of going to shit. And it's happening everywhere because there's sort of like structural overcapacity in manufacturing.
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And the solution to this is a spatial fix, right, which is destroying some manufacturing capacity and just moving it to other places. Yeah. And, you know, and this is sort of what James was talking about earlier, right?
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The goal is to sort of weaken the power of the working class by locking people down into their countries and then moving capital to poorer countries, the weaker labor protections, and also a weaker level of sort of like workers' organization, right?
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Look, as someone in my Blue Sky mentions says, capitalism currently, the rule of capitalism seems inescapable, but the divine rule of the chiefs once seemed undefeatable too, and they were fucking humiliated. Oh my god, they lost so bad. I can't even say that they were beaten up and down the field because they didn't even fucking get down the field.
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Yeah, and this was done deliberately, right? I mean, there's always a debate in the literature about to what extent neoliberalism was planned or to what extent it was... you know, a sort of reaction to a bunch of crises, but specifically this kind of like offshoring and the container ships, a big part of this, but like this specific kind of thing.
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You say that as kind of a joke, but genuinely, the fact that we are doing a bunch of stuff that is leading to the full rearmament of the German army at the moment when the German fascist parties are about to take power. Yeah, when AfD is getting into power.
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Yeah, and the ADF, it's worth mentioning, right? The ADF is so right-wing and so Nazi that the Italian fascists who are in power right now will not work with them. Yeah, yeah. A bunch of stuff leaked a little while ago about... These people at meetings openly talking about deporting every single Jew and every single immigrant from the country.
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And even the transition from cold oil was like, was a very deliberate thing done by like done, done by sort of American and British politicians in, in order to sort of break the power of like miners unions. Um, And, you know, one of the major places that this went, obviously, like, a lot of these things go to Mexico.
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Like, these people are, you know, I mean, they're just Nazis. And, yeah, so now we're fucking handing them the fucking justification to fucking rebuild their entire arms industry. Yep. Great stuff.
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The sort of first round of these go to, like, the original, like, Asian tiger economies that I was talking about. But, I mean, places like Indonesia, too, with a lot of those economies, sort of Thailand. Those economies kind of blew up in the 90s.
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But, you know, one of the largest and most important ones was China. Yeah. And, you know, it's important to sort of remember, I've talked about this on the show before, a lot of this is also the product of Tiananmen Square.
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Because it's really not that hard, right? If you just go do the thing, it will happen. And suddenly it ceases to be this like, oh, this domain of expert knowledge or this like, oh, this is a really difficult thing. If you just, I don't know, you go give food to someone and suddenly you've done that and it's happened.
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So there are things that are important to like basic organizing stuff, knowing how to book rooms from like churches, from libraries, from whatever meeting spaces, and also knowing how to book rooms in places that like accommodate disabilities. Yeah. is a huge thing because a lot of people book meetings in places that are wheelchair accessible and it's a fucking fiasco.
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And you can avoid that very easily, but you have to put a little tiny bit of work into it.
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Yeah, you know, there's a range of people's schedules, getting people to show up for stuff. Things you can do to prepare if what you're doing is basically all the things we've been describing, right? Getting together a bunch of people to do a thing that is technically forming an organization. Yeah.
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Now, how formal or informal you want it to be or just, you know, maybe it's just your organizing project or whatever. There's things you usually want. You want some kind of email so people can contact you. In tandem with the email, something that's very helpful that I think younger people tend not to think about is getting Google Voice. Yes.
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When Google Voice lets you set up a voicemail account so people can call you and leave phone messages. I mean, everyone should just do this because this is the way that a lot of older people communicate, right? They won't send you an email, but they will leave you a voice message. And it's very, very useful for this.
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And childcare is something that's important. I did. I mean, a lot is probably too strong of a word, but like I did childcare when I was organizing and it wound up being really helpful because there's a lot of people with kids. And so, you know, there's a couple of ways that this could work. One is that, you know, you have you have everyone bring their kids. You have like a little space.
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You bring them like coloring stuff. You bring them toys. You bring them games and you just sort of watch everyone for a while.
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And as an organizing thing, again, if you're good with kids, that's very useful, staggeringly useful organizing skill. Yeah. Another way this stuff happens is, you know, everyone pulls together 10 bucks and you hire a babysitter. Yeah. For a bunch of kids. And that's a very useful organizing thing.
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Yeah. There are some other very basic things that I think are very important if you've never done this before. I'm going to talk a little bit about how you run a meeting. Yeah. And you would think that this doesn't matter until you watch a group of 100 people who don't know how to do this attempt to get anything done. And it just is a fiasco. And this is even true of sort of smaller groups. Yeah.
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So I'm going to give you how to run a meeting 101. Okay. Okay, a very common way to organize meetings that people use all over the world and it's very effective is you have two things. You have an agenda and you have a stack. And those are like the technical terms for them. The agenda, I mean, it's an agenda, right? You know what an agenda is. You put the things that you need to do on it.
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And another thing that's very helpful with these is, you know, you're going to be operating under time constraints because people don't have 45 hours to be in meetings. And my God, you don't want to be in a meeting for that long. Yeah.
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You know, knowing how long roughly you want to talk about these things is very, very useful and making sure that you're sort of moving the conversation through the stuff on the agenda because you have more stuff that you need to talk about. Yeah. All of this, again, like this all sounds very obvious. And again, you know how to do it. But until you've been in a room where people...
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have not realized they need to do this. You don't understand how important this stuff is. Yeah, the pain of it not happening. God, I have watched rooms full of like, these are like professional scientists, right? This is an entire room of 150 people with physics PhDs who don't know how to run a meeting. And it's a shit show.
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And all of this stuff could have been avoided with some very, very simple things. Yes. The other thing, and this is genuinely a piece of social technology, right, is the stack. It is very simple, right? You have one person who is the stack keeper and when someone wants to talk, you have one person talking at a time.
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And when someone wants to talk, they raise their hand or they make some kind of signal to the stack keeper and that person writes their name down. And so you now have a list of who gets to talk in what order. And so you go down the list and people get to say things. And again, you know how to do this. This is not like a complicated thing.
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But again, I have watched people who collectively have like more PhDs than like I earn money in a week. Like... who know I cannot be able to figure this out. And you do. I believe in you. I believe in you, dear listener, that you can do this. There's a very common... Sometimes this is one person. Sometimes this is two people.
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A very common way to do it is to have a stack taker and then have someone who's the facilitator. And the facilitator's job is to call on the people and to try to move the conversation forwards and make sure everyone's involved. And also, another important part of this, and this is, again, something you'll know from your stupid work meetings, is you have to get people like me to shut up.
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Your meetings can't just be one person giving a speech. You have to cut them the fuck off and you have to get to the next person.
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Yeah, yeah. And finally, on this note, there's a lot of... If you want to go into more technical stuff, part of the things the facilitators use and part of...
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You know, the formal name for this is like the progressive stack, but it's just a thing that's very useful in organizing is you want to make sure everyone in a room is engaged and talking and that it's not just three people who talk all the time. Yeah.
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And, you know, and so the idea of the progressive stack, right, is you're trying to find the most marginalized people in the group, people who are least likely to speak, and you're trying to get them in first. Yeah. And sometimes this is literally just like, Hey, someone hasn't been talking in a meeting this whole time.
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And you can like ask them what they think about something or ask if they have anything to say. And a lot of times they will, but they just don't feel confident enough to say it. And this is, this is a very, very important skill for a facilitator or just even, you could just do this in a meeting too, right? Like,
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You can be the person who goes like, hey, do you have this person have anything to contribute? And that is an enormous thing. Sometimes it can be, you know, sometimes it can be a little bit awkward, but it's a very important thing because you're just losing out on people who have really, really valuable ideas and contributions and plans.
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And if you just let the same three people give speeches, you can't get to the stuff that's actually useful.
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Yeah. So I'm going to put all of this together briefly, and I'm going to run through basically how we started the first organizing project I ever did, which was at a tenants' union in Chicago. Okay. So, and this is based on my memory. It's been a long time since I did this, but my basic memory of what we did was... Okay, so one of my friends is an experienced organizer.
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I was like a tiny baby, right? This was my first offline organizing project ever, right? I had no idea what I was doing. I still thought I was a guy, which, like, that's how much of a fiasco, like, little tiny baby Mia who doesn't know anything this was, you know.
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And so my friend talked to some people that he knew, and he knew that I, you know, I was interested in getting involved in tenants organizing, and we, like, went to a cafe.
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And we sat down and we ate and we just talked about what we wanted to do, what our plans were, what things we needed to do to get this organization set up. We talked about ideological stuff. And that's actually is something that's important, too, is part of organizing is getting people to think intentionally about their actions. and think politically about their actions. Yeah.
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And that's something that's very useful. You also have to make sure that you're not forming a book club. Book clubs are fine, but you need to make sure your organizing group, if you're trying to do a thing, hasn't just become a book club. Yeah. But that was something that was very useful to us, and we started making a plan.
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And our plan was, okay, we made a bunch of flyers, and then we went out, and I did this, and I walked around through a bunch of streets, and we put them on light posts or whatever, and then we put them... Like, we hung them up in the buildings of tenants. Because you can just, like, walk up the stairs, right? And you just put them on the walls. And, you know, we had this flyer.
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This flyer had information. This flyer said, okay, we're starting a tenants union. If you have issues with your landlord or you want to talk about tenant stuff, like, come here at this time. We had an email. You can send us stuff. We had a phone number that you could call. You know, and so, okay. And so, parallel to this, we, like... I forget if it was a church or if it was some building...
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some center or something. We, we booked a room. We were kind of lucky in that we had like local press people. Nice. Who we sort of knew.
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And this is another useful, like if knowing a journalist can be a very useful skill, because one way to get a project off the ground, if you're trying to get to a bunch of people is by finding a journalist who is willing to cover it because, you know, we're, we're finding, we're founding like the first tenants union in this place. Right. Yeah.
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And you know, so we had media coverage and we got kind of screwed with, when this event eventually came together because there was like three feet of snow that night. Yeah. But people still came. Like, people still came in the blizzard. Like, a lot of people showed up for this. What are things we do? We also, like, you know, we just started talking to people, right?
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We started talking to tenants about their problems. We just, you know, we talked to our friends. We talked to the people they knew. We ended up talking to someone. You know, and this is the thing that just happens. As this spreads by word of mouth, right, people start contacting you. We ran into a really long-time tenants organizer, right?
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in the city who had a bunch of incredible stories about how our corrupt politicians got their jobs by betraying the old tenants organizers. Right. And I guess everything is, you know, another thing that happens in projects is you'll, you'll sometimes you'll just, you'll just pick up someone who's, you know, has been doing this since like the sixties. Yeah.
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And it rules because they have a wealth of experience and they, they want to go, they want to do stuff. We plotted out what we were going to do at our meeting. You know, we were going to do some political education. We were going to have a bunch of time for people to talk about stuff. And we were going to, you know, get people to understand what we were doing, how they can start organizing.
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And then we did it. And I, unfortunately, don't remember much of what we talked about because I was off in another room taking care of a bunch of people's kids, which was very nice. But I don't remember what we talked about. But like, you know, but like all of those things, right? All of those steps from the start of organizing
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You get five of your friends to go eat dinner, and you talk about what you want to do through someone makes a flyer in, like, Microsoft or whatever. You make it in, like, PowerPoint. MSP. Publisher. What's the one I'm blanking? I haven't used it in so long. The one you make greeting cards in. WordArt. WordArt.
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There's like an actual program and I forgot what it is. Used to use it to make Christmas cards. But like, you know, okay, so we made a flyer and we walked around and put the flyers up and we made an email. You know, we got a space together. We figured out what we wanted to do. And then we did it. Yeah. And, you know, and there's a bunch of organizing from there, right?
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But, like, we had started a thing. And you can do every single one of those steps. And if you can't personally do one of those steps, you can think of a person who you know, who you can bring in to help you do these things. Because organizing, you already fucking know how to do it. Yeah. You just have to go out there and do it. Yeah. You can have faith. Yeah. And this has been It Could Happen Here.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where I, your host, Mia Wong, talks about inflation. We have covered inflation on this show extensively, and now it is once again time to return to it as we head into a world where concerns about inflation and the economy are the most cited justifications for people voting for one Donald Trump.
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But unlike our other, oh God, so many episodes about inflation, this one is going to be a bit different. It's going to start out somewhat similar in that I am going to lay out a brief explanation of the sort of material causes of the inflation cycle and talk a bit about inflation theories, which is what we've been largely doing on this show for a while.
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And then I'm going to explain why none of that shit mattered, why none of what was actually causing inflation mattered a single bit, because ultimately our experience of inflation, and more importantly of price in general, is based on a sense of justice, or as the academics call it, a moral economy, and not on, you know, anything that's sort of going on.
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So let's begin with what is going on with inflation. Now, as we've discussed before on this show, most economists do not understand why inflation happens. People will take theories. Those theories are usually quite bad. There is no mainstream consensus on what is going on. As both me and my friends at the magazine Strange Matters have pointed out,
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Former Federal Reserve Governor Daniel Tarullo said, quote, the substantive point is that we do not at present have a theory of inflation dynamics that works sufficiently well to be of use for the business of real-time monetary policymaking. So again, this is a guy who used to be a Federal Reserve Governor who has admitted that they have no idea what the fuck is going on with inflation.
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Looking at the extent to which people don't know what's going on to inflation and how the various theories simply don't work is a large part of Steve Mann's notes towards the theory of inflation, which is a strange manners article that a lot of this will be pulled from. And we've had Steve on the show talk about this before.
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So there are a lot of theories about inflation and none of them work very well. Inflation on a fundamental level is just prices going up. People have this tendency to think about inflation in terms of the value of money going down. But on a pure level, all inflation says is that prices go up.
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Now, the most common theory of inflation is, you know, inflation is based on there being too much money in the economy.
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And the thing about those theories is that they don't work outside of like a very few specific examples of hyperinflation that loom large over our understanding of what inflation is, even though they have absolutely quantitatively and theoretically, they have absolutely nothing to do with the inflation that we've seen over the past four years.
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So instead of talking about that shit anymore, Mann and the Strange Matters crew developed what they call the supply chain theory of inflation. So I'm going to read the quote from Notes Towards the Theory of Inflation. As economist J.W. Mason recently remarked on his website, inflation is just an increase in prices. So for every theory of price setting, there's a corresponding theory of inflation.
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If inflation theory is downstream of price setting, this is still a quote from that article, but not the J.W. Mason quote, If inflation is downstream of price theory, then no account of inflation can begin with the macro economy at all, since prices are set at the micro level.
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Rather, you need to look at particular industrial sectors, their supply chains, and ultimately the pricing decisions of their firms. Only then are the true causes of inflation, both the internal failures of the industrial system and external shocks to it which can cause price rises, revealed. Mann's price theory is fairly simple, right?
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It flows from the basic observation that prices are set by guys in offices, not by something, you know, abstract as like market forces and supply and demand. In economic terms, what this argument amounts to is the argument that corporations are price makers and not price takers, right? There's a bunch of guys, they sit in offices and they develop a strategy about what prices are going to be.
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And that's, you know, how they're set. And what matters to the people who develop prices are things like goodwill, which is to say not pissing off their customers by raising prices, and things like their balance sheets, which reflect, you know, their incomes and costs. Price in this model is just cost plus markup.
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And we know this is how prices are actually set because, as Mann points out, people have gone through and done surveys of pricing managers and asked them how they set prices, and the answer is cost plus markup. So what would cause these guys in offices to increase their prices?
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Well, these are companies that are all part of a global supply chain, a very, very broad global supply chain and a very complicated global supply chain.
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This means that if the cost of the stuff they buy from other suppliers on the chain in order to produce what they're selling, if those prices go up because there is, to use a purely hypothetical example, a giant global pandemic, those cost increases eventually had to be passed down to the people paying the products so that the corporation can maintain its balance sheets and maintain its sort of price plus markup as something that covers their costs, right?
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This is what set off the giant inflation spike in the US and the Biden administration. You know, the cost side of cost plus markup exploded. But it doesn't really matter why the prices increased for our purposes. And our purposes are looking at sort of why Trump won the election. What was important, you know, about inflation wasn't even the price increases.
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It was the narratives around inflation and how we understand the economy at a moral level. And for that, we're going to turn to one of the most popular accounts of inflation, so-called greedflation. Now, as we've said, price is cost plus markup. And you can raise prices because of cost. But you can also do this because you want to increase your markup.
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And this is something that happened during the inflation surge. Companies realized that consumers were willing to accept higher prices without the usual goodwill hit because they thought the prices were going up because inflation was happening.
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And because they were willing to accept the higher prices and not try to shop somewhere else, corporations went, fuck it, let's just keep jacking the prices up. And this really, really pissed people off. It still does. And this is something that was true across the entire political spectrum, right? People were very, very angry about this sort of re-inflation thing.
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And that rage is more important than the technical details of why inflation happened. Because the way we understand inflation is not through conventional economics. We understand it through the moral economy.
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And when we come back from a different kind of economy, which is to say this ad break, we are going to examine what the moral economy is, how it differs from our sort of regular economy, where it came from, and why it's relevant to our situation now. And we are so back. All right, let's talk about the moral economy. The moral economy is a concept developed by the British historian E.P.
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Thompson in the early 1970s. Thompson was attempting to explain the previous century and a half of bread riots by what he termed the English crowd by applying anthropological principles to their actions. I'm just going to read from Thompson's The Moral Economy of the English Crowd here.
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It is of course true that riots were triggered off by soaring prices, by malpractice among dealers, or by hunger. But these grievances operated within a popular consensus as to what were legitimate and what were illegitimate practices in marketing, milling, baking, etc.
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This, in its turn, was grounded upon a consistent traditional view of social norms and obligations, of the proper economic function of several parties within the community, which, when taken together, can be said to constitute the moral economy of the poor. An outrage to these moral assumptions, quite as much as actual deprivation, was the usual occasion for direct action."
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Now, the moral economy of the English crowd in the 18th century is about a very specific period in British history, which is to say the 1700s, and about how people thought bread should be sold.
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Peasants and the new urban workers had very specific ideas about bread, about how bread should be produced, about who should be allowed to sell it, about where and when they should be allowed to sell it, about how it should be sold, how it should not be sold.
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And because of this and, you know, because of their experience in sort of previous systems that before the sort of imposition of the free market system or quote unquote free market system, they have a very specific series of hatreds. They hate middlemen. They hate grain hoarders. They hate all of the aspects of the new quote unquote free market that impose additional costs and burdens on them.
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And they also believed that elites have a kind of moral duty to the masses based on the norms and traditions of their society. And when they welch on that deal in a way that makes people's lives worse, people get extremely pissed off. These peasants and, you know, urban workers particularly hated price increases. And they hated price increases so much that this frequently turned into riots.
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But the actual contents of these riots are very interesting. Instead of simply seizing all of the grain, they do something else entirely. Here's Thompson again, quote, the central action in this pattern is not the sack of granaries and grain or flour, but the action of, quote, setting the price.
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from a few lines later, they might then order the farmer to send, quote, convenient quantities to market to be sold, quote, and at a, quote, reasonable price. The justices were further empowered to, quote, set down a certain price upon a bushel of every kind of grain. So if you follow this here, right, what's happening in these British bread riots is that the revolt isn't just
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about there, you know, being a price to grain, it's that people have a very, very specific moral understanding of what the price of grain should be. And they take direct actions that are designed to set the price of grain to the level they thought it should rest at. And this kind of action is extremely common sort of across Europe in this entire time period, right?
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It's also a hallmark of the French Revolution. You can see in this, right, in this sort of rage over price in the sense of justice, the outlines of our current moral economy.
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You have, you know, staggering outrage as price increases seen as unjust, which is re-inflation, or just inflation in general, because people are just mad about the concept of the price going up, paired with rage at the elites, which manifests in sort of hatred of Joe Biden and the Democrats for being the people who presided over these price increases.
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We also have our own rage about price gouging. In immediate market terms, and this is something that the most annoying libertarians and the defenders of the market love to point out, there's nothing actually wrong by market economics about, say, Martin Shkreli jacking the price of medicine up until you can't afford it anymore.
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Or, you know, other things that we find extremely terrible, like people jacking the price of water when people need water, like bottled water during hurricanes. We are all outraged. So why do we feel morally strong about it? And that is the moral economy, baby!
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This is something that, you know, these reactions, right, the emotional reactions we have to this, the sense of injustice that we feel, are almost entirely outside of the realm of what you would call traditional economics, right? And that's because we're functioning on something that is, in some senses, older than that kind of economics.
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But there's something else going on here at a fundamental level. And what's important about price and the reaction to inflation is that it's an outrage based on a sense of justice, right? This rage is not a measure of direct exploitation necessarily. I think it was the political scientist James C. Scott who wrote his own book called The Moral Economy of the Peasant.
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And Scott argues that, you know, and E.B. Thompson also argues this, that it's the moral angle that causes people to revolt, not the direct level of exploitation. You can, in fact, you know, inflict hideous exploitation on people as long as they think that it's just. But when you violate these moral principles, that's when people really lose it.
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But it also means, right, the fact that the sort of sense of outrage is not necessarily directly tied to to the exploitation level, it means that rich people can be bad about inflation, even though they're completely fine, because these people also still have this sort of sense of justice about what prices should be.
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Now, it's also worth noting here that it is possible to have high inflation rates and have everyone be fine. In fact, we have discussed scenarios like that on this show. In my episodes about the rise of Lula, the current president of Brazil, we discussed how military dictatorship in Brazil produced an economy that was, you know, you had 20% year-on-year inflation, right?
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But also you had 40% yearly wage increases. And so everyone was like kind of fine with it because because the amount of money you were making was going up every year, so nobody really cared about even things like the military dictatorship itself. There was not an enormous amount of opposition to it.
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But then Brazil's trade unions figured out the government had been lying about inflation numbers, and this started off a series of protests that would send Lula into his political career, and eventually this is one of the sort of dominoes that leads to knocking down the military dictatorship. And that's because the level of exploitation people were living under hadn't changed
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But the deal that they had made, right, the sort of deal with with the military government of like, we won't do anything. Our wages will continue to go up and inflation will continue to be work at a certain level such that we're still getting paid.
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That deal was violated and that sense of injustice was powerful enough to really kickstart an extremely powerful Brazilian labor movements and kickstart the fall of a dictatorship.
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Now, one of Thompson's arguments was that the success of Adam Smith and his cohort, and Smith is moving around and making his arguments about what the free market is in the period where we're dealing with all of these sort of grain crises. His argument is that the success of Smith was moving economics out of the domain of morality where it was born.
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Economics was originally an aspect of moral philosophy, right? It was part of that discipline. But, you know, Smith and his people move it out. And this is why liberal economists find the anger about inflation so incomprehensible. They see it in purely statistical terms and go like, look, the economy is great. Why is everyone mad?
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And, you know, I could get into here a bunch of arguments about whether or not this is actually true. I mean, I'm going to return to my sort of classic argument about like, well, yeah, OK, even if you believe all of the economic indicators are great for cis people like I'm trans for me, the economy is it has an unemployment rate of like 1936 U.S. Great Depression.
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So, you know, there are a lot of people for whom the economic outlook is not good. People for whom, you know, even the wage increases that they got in this period still leave them in sort of hideous and crippling poverty. And none of that shit matters because the statistics that these people are trying to use to try to get everyone to calm down are not operating in the inside of the moral economy.
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They're operating outside of it because they're from a tradition that is specifically about not working inside the moral economy. And the people they're interacting with are in the moral economy. But why is it like this, right? Why do we have a moral economy that functions this way?
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In the case of the peasants and, you know, the working people of the 1700s across Europe, and, you know, this goes on through the 1800s too, right? We can trace the moral economy to a very, very specific set of conditions and traditions and expectations rooted in how people traditionally bought bread. But what are the conditions of the modern American moral economy?
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To understand that, we need to turn to the concept of price itself. But first, do you know what guarantees low price? Actually, I probably should not say the word guarantee. That is probably staggeringly illegal. You know what probably has low prices? It's the products and services that support this podcast. We are back. So let us now turn to price.
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The political economists Shimshong Bickler and Jonathan Neitzan argue that price is the unit of what orders capitalist society. You know, price is like the fundamental unit of political economy. It's the thing that orders and structures the entire society. If you want to know more about this, read their book Capitalist Power. It's quite good.
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I am mentioning them because I'm about to misuse their argument completely in tandem with a quote from Marx that I am also about to misuse. And I am going to do this to make a different point. So I agree with Bickler and Nietzsche that price is the unit that orders capitalist society. But what I'm interested in is price as what's called a social hieroglyphic.
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Now, social hieroglyphic is a term that's a one-off term that Marx used once to talk about how price mystifies the nature of value, whatever. I don't care about that. I care about it because price. there's something very interesting about price itself. And there's something interesting about the notion of a hieroglyph.
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Now, Marx is using hieroglyph in the term of like, it's something you have to be decoded, right? Because he's writing in the 1800s. This is, you know, everyone's obsessed with hieroglyphs. I am using hieroglyphs because hieroglyphs are also a method of encoding complex information into a single character, right? Price as a social hieroglyph
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is important because price is the mechanism through which we understand and often through which we fail to understand the world. Our entire lives in the eyes of the people who rule this world, our entire lives are captured in a single number. Everything you do at work is ultimately just a price on a corporate spreadsheet.
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The entirety of the labor process of producing a good, every hour worked, every drop of sweat, every tear, every broken body and shattered city and trade union is lined up in front of a firing squad, appears in the end as a simple number. Price. To express it another way, here's Daniel Cahn and the Painted Bird from their song, The Butcher's Share.
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Let's take a walk around the old bazaar where every little thing has traveled far. Every pair of pants and grain of rice contains this horror story and its price. A story of the power people wield. A story about factories and fields. A story of what you'll never have to be aware just as long as the butcher gets his share. Price, this single number, is how we understand the world.
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And it causes us to treat price, and thus inflation, as a matter of morality and not economic rationality. Because price is the way that our society causes us to interact with people. It's the way we interact with objects. It is the thing that structures the way we all behave and understand the world. But price has another function. It is the gatekeeper of capitalist society.
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Because price and a man with a gun is what's standing between you and the ability to live your life. Outrage at the moral economics of price increases are similar but not identical to the impulses behind looting. Everything that you've ever need and have been unable to get is, when you walk into a grocery store, just sitting there right in front of you.
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But between you and it is a number and a man with a gun. And the man with a gun fucking hates you. So the moment you're free, you just take it. Price, and the entire economic system behind it, is organized very specifically so you don't do this. E.P. Thompson argued that the moral economy was pre-political.
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The movements that it produced could be extremely well organized, but they fundamentally were not the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. In 2020, we, for a brief moment, saw the outlines of that movement. The uprising was brutally crushed. In its place, we saw the emergence of pre-political concerns about price, right? We saw, once again, a massive panic about inflation.
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And this is not to say that inflation didn't hurt people. It did. It was, in large extent, a fiasco. But look at the politics for a moment that this has produced, right? What the media understands is economic anxiety.
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And what I think we can now better understand as the moral economy that is a result of the fact that our entire economic system is structured by price and that we encode all of the information in our life into prices that we sell ourselves for and that we in turn are sold things for. those prices going up, the product of it was Trump, right?
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And there's, I think, a reason why these sort of pre-economic explanations are preferred to the answers and, you know, to the actions that people saw in 2020. Four years later, Portland, one of the centers of the uprising, now has almost every grocery store at the exit of it is armed guards with guns. And these guards are there to maintain the price system.
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They're there because for a very brief moment, people started thinking something dangerous. They started thinking, what if this didn't have a price?
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It could happen here, the podcast that's happening right now. This is maybe the foremost of the Putting Things Back Together episodes. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is James Stout. A guy who likes to put things together. Yeah.
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And, you know, on the subject of putting things together, over the last, I don't even know, three, four weeks, the question I have been asked the most by everyone is, how do I start organizing?
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And, you know, the problem with how do I start organizing is that it's not a question that has clean or simple answers. Now, the most common answer you get is just join an org. And the problem is that most of the people who you are hearing this from are already in an org and want you to join their org.
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Yep, and that's a lot of orgs. Yeah, that takes most of them, right? Now, we'll come back to orgs in a bit, but what I'll say about orgs is that, okay, if you know an organization in your area that you like and you think does good work and most importantly spends their time actually doing work instead of either infighting or talking about doing work, join them. It'll be good.
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But the important thing about organizations, and this is something we'll come back to later, the important thing about organizations is they have a lot of people. Yeah. And the thing that makes organizing work is people. It's not organizations. It's not even necessarily ideological labels. It's there being a bunch of people who you can use and who want to do things. Yeah.
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But something I realized, the more I had these conversations, right? You know, I'm having it with friends. I'm having them with strangers. I'm having them with other organizers. And the more I had these conversations, the more I realized something sort of startling. You, the person listening to this, almost certainly already knows how to organize, but you don't know that that's called organizing?
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Yeah, that's a very good point. I have encountered some of the most stunning... I mean, organizing that, like... I can't discuss the specifics of, but some of the best organizing I've ever encountered, I have ran into in the last three weeks from people who don't think that they're organizers and started talking to me about their stuff. And I was like, what? Like...
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People are winning victories that the hardcore committed organizers haven't been able to do in like 30 years. Yeah. And it's just by random people who don't think they know how to do anything.
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Yeah, and that's part of what I want to try to, the myth I want to try to puncture with this, because I think, particularly in the US, but this is true in a lot of places, there's this way in which the organizer, sort of TM, capital T, capital O, the organizer gets held up as this sort of, I guess, particularly masculinist thing, which is it's this guy with specialized knowledge.
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And that's just not true. This brings us to something that I think is actually really important, which is what even is organizing, right? And the answer is that most organizing is you get a group of people together, you get them to show up to something, and then you do something, right? And the thing about this, right, That's something all of you know how to do.
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If you can organize a dinner party, right? If you can get eight people to show up to a place to eat dinner, you can do this. It is largely the same skill sets. And all of the skill sets that make people good organizers are skill sets that you have to develop to, you know, work a job, right?
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You know, like one of the things that comes up a lot in this, which is less discussed and also kind of annoying, but, you know, you have to manage it, is that organizing is about people. Mm-hmm. And sometimes you have to, you know, you have to do things like you have to manage people's egos. But like, I don't know, almost all of you work jobs or have worked jobs, right?
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You have had to like deal with your boss being on one, right? You have the skills to do this. You know how to do the interpersonal relationship stuff. It's just that you don't think about that as organizing, even though that's just what it is. Yeah, that's the core of it, is getting people to do stuff.
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Yeah. And the way you do this is by building relationships with people. Right. And this isn't necessarily friendships, although that works. And like one of the easiest ways to start organizing is by getting all of your friends together because you're already friends. You have preexisting relationships and being like, OK, motherfuckers, we got to go do something.
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And actually, I love that the first thing that you brought up was an admittedly sort of medium-ish scale lift version of this. But one of the very easiest things that you can do is you can just get food of some kind. You can either buy it or you can make it yourself. And you and a group of like eight people, not even eight people, you can do it with lower.
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I know people who've done this just solo, is that you can just go give food to people.
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Yeah, and there's a second compounding thing here, too, which is that... You know, feeding people, it's a way to build relationships with people. And also, it's a really good way for people to get to know you in general and know that you are someone who will help them with things. Yeah. And from there, and this is a very common exception.
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I mean, this is I literally had this conversation with with one of my friends who's like an old school Food Not Bombs organizer. Food Not Bombs is a very, very it's a cool organization. You can just like found a Food Not Bombs chapter online. They have like a couple of principles or you can just do your own thing. And I'm pretty sure it's still like the largest anarchist project in the world.
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Yeah. Because all it takes is you and like three other people and you just go feed people. But the thing is, from doing that, right, if there's other things that you're concerned about, people will bring you their problems and you can help them doing it. And this is a very good way to get into other kinds of organizing because suddenly you're
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Once you start building these relationships, everything sort of cycles and cycles and you know, you get involved in more and more things. Yeah. And that's kind of a that's kind of a late stage thing that we're sort of jumping to a bit. But I want to go back to the beginnings of how so how do you get a group of people together to do a thing?
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And the answer is you kind of already know how to because you presumably at some point in your life have like organized a group of friends to go do something, right? Like you've gotten a group of people together to go accomplish a task.
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One way I've been thinking about it recently in my project is thinking about it as like putting together a heist crew. Yeah. Okay, I could vouch for this, right? The feeling of walking up to eight people and telling them individually, I'm putting together a team and I want you. It feels, you could just do it. There is nothing stopping you.
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Nothing in the world can stop you from just walking up to your friend and going, I'm putting together a team. And it feels exactly as good as you think it would for a heist movie. It rules. It's so fun. Amazing. Yeah, but this gets into also what kinds of people you want to do, right? Because obviously, you know, there's two vectors of this.
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There's, on the one hand, you have the aspect of, okay, who do you know, right? And a lot of organizing is just about... Here is a problem, and I know someone who has some sort of skill or resource that can help deal with it, and you put people in touch with each other, and that's organizing. So much organizing is literally just, hey, I have a broken part of my car.
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I know someone who's a car mechanic, right? And you put them in touch, and you have successfully organized people, and you have built relationships, and you have made... all of the sort of social web that creates organizing, you've made it stronger. Yeah.
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It also just feels good because, you know, and that's an auxiliary benefit to all of this is that it's a great way to sort of break the isolation we're all under.
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Yeah, and do you know what else will help you enter a situation with more hope?
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I don't know if I'm allowed to say this, but we are not in control of the length of the ads. They just do it. We're sorry. Here's a really long period of ads. I'm so sorry. We are back. So I want to return to my heist career. I don't know, if you're a D&D person, the other way you can think about this is you're putting together like a Dungeons & Dragons party or like an RPG party.
Behind the Bastards
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And the way you need to think about this is, okay, so you've picked a thing that you want to do, right? You've seen something in the world that is bad and you figure it, you go, okay, I can do this thing to solve it. And maybe that's, you know, it's literally something as simple as feeding people. Maybe that's... You know, I want to start I want to start doing tenants organizing.
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I want to start because my rent is too high. Right. People are getting evicted. I want to start doing like immigration defense. Yeah. And from there, you make a list. And that list is, you know, what you're interested in doing. And you try to match what things need to be done with people, you know, who have those skills.
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And this is where you really get into the heist things, right? Because everyone has their sort of like heist role. Now, obviously, part of this that you want is you want to create sort of balanced teams, right? You want people who have overlapping strengths so you don't just have only one person who can do a thing.
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And part of the way that successful organization works over time, and I mean, just how successful organizing works, is that eventually you are trying to organize yourself out of a job, which is to say you want your organization to function such that if you're not able to do it, or just you're gone, or you cycle on to a next thing, or any number of things that can happen, you want the organization to still be able to keep working without you.
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And you're trying to get people to be able to replace you as the person who's organizing the thing, right? Yeah. Yeah. And at this point, we can start talking about the kinds of skills that people need for organizing.
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And a lot of people and this is unbelievably common when I talk to people and like, especially women and especially like a lot of binary people and trans people particularly have this is that people don't believe that they have any skills. And then you talk to them for five seconds, and they're like, well, I'm good at carrying heavy objects, right? I'm good with kids, which is a huge one.
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We'll get to in a second, right? Or like, I don't know, I have a car. That's a huge skill. There are so many different skills that are so useful for so many things. I'm just going to go over lots of things that are actually really useful to get people a sense of, like, the kinds of things that there are massive roles for.
Behind the Bastards
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So one of the most important ones, and this is something you deliberately look for, you know, this is one of the things you do at the beginning of any union organizing campaign. Someone who's good at talking to other people and making friends, that is a staggeringly useful person. Because, again, most organizing is just talking to people and building relationships.
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And, you know, one of the things you do when you're doing your sort of – they call it power mapping. But when you're figuring out –
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How you're going to organize a workplace is you find the person who everyone likes and talks to and respects and you talk to that person because that person can, you know, can sort of like organize people down the chain because they have they have the relationships already. And also they're good. They'll be good at, you know, talking to new people and spreading the organization that way. Mm hmm.
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And so like, you know, if you're just someone who's social or, and this is also very useful, if you have a friend who is very social, because I know a lot of us are not very social, but you probably have a friend that you're thinking of right now who is very good at conversations and is charming and is good at making friendships.
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That person, unbelievably useful, incredibly useful and compelling skill. There are also things like research, people who are good at, and I think people are much better at research than they think. To take like a tenants organizing example, right? One of the common things you have to do is find out stuff about a landlord, right?
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And there's the higher difficulty version of that, which isn't that hard also. I want to mention this, but like going to a courthouse and finding records about who owns property companies. Not that hard. It's not that hard. It's like you could just do it, right? It's not as hard as you think it is from someone saying it. But there's also even just easier things than that, right?
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That all of you probably already know how to do, which is just looking at someone's social media profiles and finding out information about them. Yeah. And this is very useful, yeah, for like union campaigns, you know, bosses.
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And you can use it for good. Do you want to explain what OSINT is and how that process works?
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Yeah, and this is something that's very useful for, I mean, there's so many use cases for this, right? There's, you know, there's the very obvious ones where you're dealing with a local Nazi and you're trying to organize around, like, running them out, keeping people safe from them, and you can find information about them. But, I mean, it's useful for, I mean, cops who are beating people.
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It's useful for, like, politicians, particularly. It can be very useful for, it's useful for landlords. This happens all the time. It can be very, very useful for banks.
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bosses in union campaigns unions have like teams of researchers usually to like do this kind of stuff but the thing is also and this is something i don't think people understand those guys they're like the people they're hiring to be researchers are just you but they got a job being a researcher for a union They have the same skills as you.
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They know how to Google stuff, and they know how to look through people's dating profiles and look through their Facebooks and their Instagrams. A big one, a big one that rich people especially do not think about is Cash App and Venmo. Oh, Venmo is gold. Particularly Cash App. Because, yeah, yeah, because people just leave public transactions out there.
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Like, that's how they got, what's his name, the congressional... McGate. Can I legally call him the congressional pedophile? I guess I'd call him the accused pedophile. Yeah, yeah.
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And one of the ways they found that was that and also like paying for that, right? Yes. Which is rape, by the way. I want to be very clear about that. Like having sex with someone who is underage is rape. It is always rape. And the way people found that was that they just looked through like his Cash App history and they found all of these money transfers to people.
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This is all very, very simple stuff that's very, very useful organizing wise that you already know how to do. Yeah. Pinterest is another absolute bang.
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They'd be pinning. You know, if you're hearing some of these things and you think that you can figure out how to do this, that's also a huge skill. Finding people who are willing to learn things and willing to learn new skills is... is a huge benefit to organizers because this gives you a flexible person, right?
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It gives you someone you can flex into any of a bunch of roles that you need and also can pick up skills to learn things. Having a car and being able to drive, and I know a lot of you don't do this, but if you do do this, this is you immediately, even if you literally cannot contribute anything else to a project, being able to just drive a bunch of water to a place. Oh, yeah. Huge.
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Yeah, and like transport-based skills are also very useful. I mean, if you hike a lot, that's a very, very useful skill. There's a lot of sort of mutual aid projects. There's a lot of, you know, I mean, even things like setting up summer camps is a thing that like leftist groups do, right? And being able to hike, very good for that. It's good for things like wilderness rescue.
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There's a lot of, you know, James, like the work you do that has to do with like going and helping migrants like... being able to hike is staggeringly useful skill. Yeah.
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And it can literally take 10 minutes. And this is something that, you know, can scale up depending on how much skill you have, right? There's even just very basic auto maintenance stuff is very useful for stuff like this. But, you know, like if you're a carpenter, right? If you're an electrician, You do some kind of trade work, right? You do plumbing, right?
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That is a thing that is massively useful to a lot of people. There's a lot of other kind of just skills that you have from your job that can be very useful. I mean, having someone to manage a spreadsheet. Oh, yeah. Yeah, is staggeringly useful. And another one that I think people don't understand that they really have, but like being able to set up a meeting, right?
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And like having a thing that lets you be like, okay, here's when everyone is free. Like you probably have to do this for your job or just for, you know, trying to get your friends to go even just like be on a call together or like go have food or like just do anything free.
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That is what literally genuinely one of the most important skills you can possibly have as an organizer is the ability to just sort of like go talk to people and be like, hey, can you show up to this thing here? Yeah. And that is that is so much of just what organizing is. Can you be here at this time and then trying to figure out a time?
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So we're going to close out this sort of skill section with some, I think, just sort of like domestic skills that I don't think people realize are super useful. If you have a button maker, you are instantly the single most useful person in any organization. I love that.
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Or you can obtain a button maker. They're very easy to use, but if you have one or you know the person who has the button maker and suddenly you can just crank out buttons for every single event, they rule. Everyone loves them. It helps enormously. It's awesome.
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And that's a huge part of what organizing is, right? And that goes into one of the things that is also an appreciable skill that's very useful is, I mean, just like being nice to people, being kind to people and having people around who are good at keeping groups together.
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Yeah, that's its own distinct kind of person is someone who can, you know, keep all of the people who are involved in a thing, enjoying being around each other. That's that's that's a kind of person who's very valuable.
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And it's something that you can look for, you know, and if that's not you, like you can, that's something you can, you know, find in your friends, you can find in the sort of the people around you. Yeah, definitely. There's also something I think you can tell when an organization is collapsing because this is like the first thing where the quality drops.
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Drawing and graphic design are very, very useful because a big part of what you do organizing is like you make a flyer and you put a flyer on a bunch of telephone poles to tell people that there's a thing happening. Yeah. And...
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Yeah, you know, and this is also something, you know, later on you might be making a social media presence, but just having good artists and having good graphic design people is enormously useful for this kind of stuff. And along this line, there's things like making music. And there's a bunch of different ways this can go.
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This can be an immediate thing where, you know, like you have people on a picket line, right? And everyone's singing songs. And this is great. We love this. Also, and this is another thing that you can be thinking about in terms of what skills you have and what things you can create. Benefit shows. Oh, yeah.
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This has been a huge part of a lot of how some of the union stuff up here has been getting funded is by just having like punk benefit shows. And if that's the thing that you can do, or you know people in bands, you know people who make music, you know people who just make stuff who are willing to contribute it to the cause, that's great.
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No, and this is something I've been starting to say more and more. If you need a theory-brained way to say this to someone who is a curmudgeon-y Marxist who hates fun, morale is a terrain of struggle. There's a reason why morale is one of the most important factors of military campaigns. You can't get people to do things if they're too depressed to do it. And being able to raise people's morale...
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It's it's this massive if you want to get want to go into technical language is a massive force multiplier right it makes everyone you have enormously more effective the better they feel about themselves the better they feel about situation they're in and things like music things like art I mean things like pulling pranks.
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if you were a good practical jokester this is a staggeringly useful skill both like in terms of you know you need to be careful about whether you're playing your pranks on like other people in the org but like you know if you know how to just like pull pranks this is a really really useful thing in like union campaigns in tenants organizing there are a lot of people who you can prank and it's very funny and it lowers their morale and it raises your morale
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And resisting fear is another huge aspect of this, right? A lot of the ways that people, like a lot of the ways that you demobilize people, this is why regimes like this spend a lot of effort trying to make people afraid, is that it makes it harder for you to act. And the things that make you less afraid, even if they sort of seem silly, are very, very important.
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And on sort of this note, one of the things that, as you've assembled your group of people, right? One of the things that's important to be able to sort of have a grasp on is that you can't just do organizing by having it only be the capital, the serious thing, the capital T organizing thing all the time. Your organization will not hold together.
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There has to be actual like bonds formed between you and the people you're organizing with and the people you're trying to help.
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And this is something that I think you can understand in your own life pretty easily where, okay, if a random person on the street walks up to you and tells you to go do something, are you going to do it? And it's like, no, why? No, probably not. Like, I don't know, maybe it's something like really sort of Hey, there's children in a burning building. We're going to run in and grab them.
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But like the odds are, no, you're going to ignore them. But if your friend goes and tells you to do the same thing and, you know, you've been friends with them for a long time and you really care about them, the odds of you doing it are much, much higher. And that's that's all organizing is.
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It's finding ways to you have a thing to do and you go talk to people and you ask if they want to help you do it.
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And the stronger your relationships are, the more likely that is to happen. And that's why it's very important to do things like, you know, just like having potlucks, like bringing snacks to meetings. Oh, yeah. And like, you know, even if you're doing a potluck, it's good to, you know, you do like one capital O, capital T organizing thing, right? You get like a little bit of work done.
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But mostly everyone's just sort of relaxing and eating chili or whatever.
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If you're a baker, you know, you can bake for people. It's a wonderful thing to share. Oh, my God.
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Yeah. And just knowing how to cook. I realized I forgot to mention this one. Knowing how to cook is a staggeringly useful skill. It's useful in literally every, literally any kind of organizing you can possibly be in. It is a thing. It is a skill that is useful in like, it's useful in war zones. It's useful. Like literally no matter what organization you are in, if you can cook for people.
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And you don't even, and you don't have to be like a good cook. It's just like, you can show up with food that you have made. You, you have instantly made this whole thing more successful.
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We are back. So I want to wrap things up by doing a couple of doing a few things. One, I want to talk about some kind of basic organizing things that you're going to have to do that are not very difficult, but are extremely important. And second, I want to talk a bit about how we did the first organizing project that I ever was involved in, which was tenants organizing.
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I mean, I'm already seeing a bunch of reports from small businesses being like, yeah, we're fucked. And that was with the 54% tariffs. And at 125%, Entire industries are non-viable.
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Now, it's maybe possible that if it was just these tariffs and all Chinese shipping was able to be routed through some other country, maybe we would only have a regular economic collapse, like an early 2000s tech bubble collapse and not like a 2008 one. But again, that's assuming that more and more tariffs go into effect. Now, the problem is that...
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We went through this with the 90-day pauses on the Mexican tariffs and the Canadian tariffs, and then after 90 days, everyone assumed that they weren't going to go into effect again, and they just went into effect. So, the odds are that the absolutely catastrophic turf tariffs from Liberation Day are going to go into effect in about 90 days. That's probably what's going to happen.
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There's probably going to be some attempts to negotiate them down, but again, those absolutely catastrophic tariffs, which are going to just fucking annihilate the entire world economy, are probably going to go into effect And, you know, part of what's happening here, right, is that, so the markets are doing this, they're like dead cat bounce, right?
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And a lot of this is because they haven't actually stopped to think about, like, how much American manufacturing, and contra every argument everyone is making about this, there is actually a lot of manufacturing still in the U.S., but all of it relies on Chinese imports and various stages of, innovative stages of production, and they're fucked.
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I haven't even mentioned yet, by the way, the sort of capstone to all of this is that China is doing an 84% retaliatory tariff on all American goods, which is going to just fuck massive portions of American agriculture. We've talked a lot on the show about soybean exports. It's going to be absolutely catastrophic. We're going to go more into this on Monday.
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But, you know, the thing that's clear from this is that these people don't see the economy as real in the way that you and I do, right? They simply don't. You know, we look at the economy as something where we have to have a fucking job so we can go to work, so we can come home and fucking buy food for our families and pay our rent. And they think it's a fucking joke, right?
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They think it's a fucking masculinity signifier. And they think it's like they look at tariff rates and they go, this is just a number on a fucking page. And that's why the tariff rate is now 125% on China. Because none of this shit is real for them at all. Now, do you know what is real?
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We are back. Now, okay, one of the things that I've been seeing a lot of is there are a lot of arguments about whether there was some kind of plan here. Trump has claimed that he was going to roll back the tariffs all along. And no, he wasn't. No, he's just lying. He's just going by the seat of his pants. And I can prove... That there is no plan here.
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By moving on to the second thing that I want to talk about here, which is a speech given by Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Steve Mirren at the Hudson Institute. So this is, again, the Council of Economic Advisors is a federal agency that is, like, their job is to provide economic advice to the president, right? Right.
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And their chair gave a speech where he argues, and this is something that, like, I... Jesus fucking Christ, we were talking about, okay, the fact that every fucking country on Earth has U.S. Treasury bonds. We were talking about this earlier. Right, the status of the U.S. dollar as the global reserve currency.
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This guy is arguing that that is actually a public good that other countries should pay us for. He wants to force countries to fucking pay taxes...
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Every single other country on Earth is forced to buy American debt, which is what a bond is, right? Yeah. And this allows the U.S. to carry out even more spending without inflationary effects. Every single other country on Earth... Everything is based on this. Yes. Yes. It's all forced on other countries having to stockpile U.S. dollars. Literally, the entire global economy, the U.S.
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's advantage in the entire global economy is that every single other fucking country on Earth needs U.S. dollars. Part of this is to buy oil, and part of this is, again, because the dollar is the fucking reserve currency. It's the currency that fucking trade is done in, and the assets that you hold...
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is is like is the fucking u.s bond the anthropologist david graber called this in his book debt the first five thousand years a tribute system that again every country in the world is forced to buy u.s bonds the u.s government has just like fairly explicitly like you did this during the reagan administration does this other times like has just fairly explicitly leaned on countries and been like you're buying a fucking a fucking bunch of u.s bonds now right like this is this system the status of the dollar of the world reserve currency
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is the entire lattice that supports and spreads the American empire and these fucking clowns want people to pay taxes on the tribute that they are paying to us this is not Donald Trump or Elon Musk. Right. This is the guy these people brought in to be their economist, to do economic policy. Yeah, there there is no limit to their stupidity.
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There is no rock of sanity upon which the tide of madness will crash. Everything we have seen we have seen so far is just a prelude to an infinite abyss of stupidity. so mind-numbingly incomprehensible it will shatter our minds like a snowflake in a hurricane. You can no longer think to yourself, they cannot possibly be this stupid. They are thinking thoughts even gods cannot comprehend.
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They are attempting to drain the sea. by shouting at the moon. They are trying to wipe their ass with pine cones. There is no five-dimensional plan here. There was not even a man behind the fucking curtain. There was only an infinite sea of cruelty, malice, and stupidity trying to drown us all for the crime of attempting to exist in the world we were born in.
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The reality of the men who rule the American empire... Is this. It is so terrifying that everyone from the most powerful CEOs on the planet to the fucking day traders running the stock markets to broke leftist shit posters recoil in horror and try to construct meaning and some kind of like anything, any kind of strategy, any kind of strategic reason why anyone could possibly be doing this.
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Because the existence of a plan, literally any plan, no matter how evil it is, is preferable to this, which is that the largest economy... In the world, the most powerful empire the world has ever seen is being run by the dumbest people who have ever fucking lived. And they are doing this because they are evil and they're stupid.
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One other thing I want to close out this episode on, so we have an episode out about this already, but one of the things ICE has been doing has been targeting migrant farm worker labor organizers. They have basically just kidnapped, just straight up broke this guy's window in his car and dragged him out.
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A guy named Alfredo Juarez, who's known as Lalo, he is an organizer for Familias Unidas por la Justicia in Washington. And there is going to be a protest. This will be Saturday the 12th. It'll be tomorrow as you're listening to this on Friday at Portland City Hall at 2 p.m.
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Organizers are also asking that you call the Washington Attorney General to demand pressure be put on everyone to release him. Yeah, if you want to hear more about that, I have an interview with an organizer who works with them. And
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yeah it's real fucking bad the the scale of the repression has been increasing it's not undefeatable and this is a you know this is a this is a tangible thing that you can do to try to stop them but yeah it requires movement now and yeah do this now before it gets worse
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where here is the rapidly encroaching rise of fascism. My name is Mia Wong, and one of the major vectors of fascism that we have been covering on this show has been the increase in just effectively straight-up black baggings by ICE and Immigration Enforcement in general. We have...
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spent a good amount of time covering a bunch of different angles of this but there is another incredibly distressing angle that we have not covered as much yet which is their targeting of labor organizers and with me to talk about that is mark medina from portland jobs with justice and the coalition of independent unions and yeah mark welcome to the show
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Yeah, I'm glad to have you on. So one of the most pressing sort of blackbaggings that's happened fairly recently is ICE's kidnapping of Alfredo Juarez de Ferrino, otherwise known as Lalo. Can you tell us about sort of his work and the projects that he's been doing and Familias Unidas por la Justicia?
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And yeah, and that's something that, you know, like you can tie that exclusion.
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Like there's a straight line between that and Japanese internment, which also to a large extent is just is about land seizure and the sort of like fusion of racism, specifically racism in the farming sector with with tax and labor rights and with this desire to just sort of seize literally the land and labor from non-white people.
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Yeah, we are going to go to ads, regrettably, and then when we come back, we are going to start talking, I think, a bit more about the repression. We are back. So obviously, this is a part of the story that you've been telling.
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The sort of capitalist class out in Bellingham, and this has been true of the broader capitalist class since this kind of organizing starting, has been trying to break these unions this entire time. That has been a major focus of everything that they've been doing. And, you know, what we're seeing right now seems like a massive sort of escalation in the degree of repression.
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So, yeah, can we talk about the recent black bagging of Lalo and yeah, and sort of what happens and where we go from there?
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I think the thing it immediately reminds me of is the story of Thomas Paine, who was slated to be executed in the French Revolution. And they didn't execute him because his door was open, so they didn't see the slash line on the cell that was supposed to execute him. And then the next day, the reign of terror ended with the coup against the Jacobins. It reminds me a lot of that.
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But on the other hand, here's the thing. We have gotten the stay of the deportation, but we have not. We have not. brought down the rate of terror yet, so...
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Yeah, good Lord. Good Lord. Yeah. Yeah, so let's talk a bit about, so I mean, obviously, you know, what we're seeing here, and this is, you know, the connection that you made is we're seeing just on a sort of broad scale, the use of the state and of the sort of black bagging and of these deportations as a way to target organizers from Palestine to labor organizers.
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That's only going to expand as this goes on. And I think something critical about, you know, one of the first things you were saying here about the fact that they're targeting sort of the loudest voices in the community. And I think a big part of this is that they know that their position isn't as strong as they're making it out to be. Right.
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Like they have just detonated a nuke across the entire economy. They are systemically going through and individually fucking over every single group of people who are supposed to be their base. Right.
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And I think part of what they're doing is they're trying to spread sort of raw terror and spread fear and attack the critical infrastructure of organizing because they want to make it look like resisting them is impossible.
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Yeah, and I think a lot of times when we win fights, it can be very, very hard to actually see our victory because we don't see the world that could have been if we didn't fight. And that's the thing I think about with the first Trump administration, where during the first Trump administration, they absolutely wanted to be doing this kind of shit.
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And they were able to do a lot of terrible stuff, but they weren't able to sort of go this far because of the kind of mass mobilizations that shut down a lot of the kinds of things that they wanted to do. And I think that's a kind of victory that is hard to process because all we see is the suffering that did happen.
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And we can never see an image of all of the people who got to continue living their lives because we stopped them. And that I think is another sort of powerful tool here. But also we do have an opportunity to make sure that we can beat them right here and right now in a way that's very, very public and visible.
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Yeah, and I think there's been a real kind of real cowardice and a real sort of appeasement of power and a real sort of demonstration of where a lot of these unions' politics are. I mean, we saw the way that the Teamsters' leadership just openly went to speak at the RNC, right? We've been seeing the UAW, which traditionally has had better leadership
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like immigration politics in the last few years than a lot of these other sort of mainstream unions but it's also been sort of going to bat for trump's tariff like i've been calling the turf tariffs tariffs because of the wages of transphobia but you know they've been going to bat for like the turf tariffs right and that i think is like part of why they've been sort of unable to like respond to this moment and why they've been unable to respond to the past fucking 50 years of moments
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Which is that if your labor politics is rooted in this American nationalist, American jobs for American workers stuff, and it's not actually based in the power of workers and the power of workers everywhere, then you're going to lose. It's not just reactionary politics, although it is. It's also bad politics, and we're seeing it right now.
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Yeah. And I mean, before we go to ads, I think the last thing I want to say there is like, you know, the other option they have is to do the option of what the unions didn't during the rise of the Nazis, which is like during the rise of the Nazis, the unions fell in line, right? They fell in line because they were scared and they thought that they could fucking win benefits from it.
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And, you know, it saved some of them. Like there were a few of those people like just became Nazis, but the rest of them got fucking liquidated anyways. So those those are your options, right?
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You either stand and fight now with the independent unions or you become part of the regime and eventually get liquidated when, you know, Trump and like fucking two and a half years signs executive order that says unions are illegal or whatever.
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Yeah, and what you become instead is just another extension of the state. You become one of the national syndicates in Francoist Spain. And what that does to you is people don't look at you in a generation as a labor movement. They look at you as just another arm of a fascist regime. And it doesn't have to be like that. It really doesn't. Yeah.
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Yeah. We're going to take an ad break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about what we can do for Lilo right now as you're listening to this. We are back.
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So let's talk about both the operation, I mean, just immediately the plans to sort of put pressure to free Lilo, and also then I guess we'll get into sort of more broadly the kinds of fighting that we need to be doing in order to resist this.
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Yeah, and so, I mean, statistically, there are a lot of you in Portland listening to this show, but statistically, most of you are not in Portland. Are there things that people in the rest of the country, and I guess the rest of the world, I know there's, some of you statistically don't live in the U.S.
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Yeah, are there things that people in other places can do to put pressure, specifically for Lalo, but also just can do in their own communities to, you know, I mean, put pressure to stop these raids?
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Hell yeah, yeah. And I think there is a lot of, you know, potential in sort of mobilizations. There's a lot of potential in getting people to understand that this stuff is happening. And there's a lot of potential in cross-union organizing.
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And also, and I will say this too, because like, you know, obviously, statistically, like, there are a large number of people listening to this who are like union staffers, but also like most of you are not unionists.
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That also doesn't mean that whatever kind of organizing that you're doing doesn't overlap with this and doesn't have capacity that they can bring to bear to stop the entire deportation regime that we're facing right now. And that's something that you have to do, both on the level of solidarity, on a moral level, and also on a strategic level, because again, it's going to come for you too. Yes.
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Yeah, it reminds me a lot of this line from Peggy Seeger, who wrote an anti-fascist song called Song of Choice. And one of the verses that's always stuck with me is, Today the soldiers took away one, tomorrow they may take away two. One April they took away Greece, but surely they will never take you. And, you know, I mean, that's the thing that people in the 30s woke up to, right?
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Is, you know, if you're in this country and this is the thing that you're waking up to now is that, yeah, the soldiers are taking people away. And every day they're taking away more and more people. And one day you wake up and they've taken entire countries. And the only way that you can stop this is by making sure that the action that you're taking is not just waking up and going back to sleep.
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You have to take a stand. You have to fight because no one is coming. The only person who is coming for these people, the only person who is coming for the people coming next to them, and inevitably the only people who is coming to save you when they come for you is going to be you. And, you know, there are enough of us to stop them, right? There always have been.
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That's always been a thing about fascism, is that it relies on us not fighting them. It relies on us, on our passivity. It relies on us not caring enough about the people that they take first, you know, to sit back and do nothing and think that we can wait. And you can't.
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You have to start right now, and you have to stop them before they advance any further, and you have to roll back what they've already done. And this is our opportunity to do that.
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Yeah. Do you have anything else that you want to add before we head out? And we will put links to a whole bunch of things in the description to this. Yeah.
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Yeah, and I mean, one last point I want to add about that in terms of looking at not needing help to do things. I know a lot of the people who are the organizers who are hired by places like the UAW, like AFL-CIO unions, right? They're good people. They're good people. They're good organizers. They don't know anything that you can't learn.
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A lot of these people are just literally college students who are recruited from college campuses and are thrown with no training into organizing these things. And again, these are people who are just stepping out of classrooms into these organizing scenarios with very minimal training, and they've been able to do it. And if those people can do it, so can you.
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Like, I know you, I know these organizers, and the only difference between them and you is that they spent some time learning some things, and then they apply the same tools, like, they apply, in some ways, worse versions of the same tools that the independent union organizers use, and they're all tools that you can learn.
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Yeah, and if and when we beat them here, we can beat them today, we can beat them tomorrow, we can beat them the next day. And one day, you know, we will have won one victory too many for them to hold on to power. And that's the only way forward.
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Yeah, and I think that's a spectacular place to end. Mark, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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And everyone else who's listening to this, go out and fight.
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Brokers are not normal people. They're not, they're not right. These, these are wall street guys. One of them has probably done it. Like that's, that's probably why it's called that.
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Yeah, how's it going? So I just saw a wonderful chart where someone was like, ah, this is one of the eight best days the S&P has ever had. And every single other one of those days is like 1929, 1931, 2008, 2020. It's one of the best days for Mount St.
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So good. So, all right. The tariff situation as of 2.43 p.m. Pacific time on April 9th is that there is... Going good.
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Don't worry about it. Oh, God. Okay, so there is a 125% tariff on all goods from China. Is that bad? You know, there's a bit that I cut here. where I was going to say about how, like, at 54%, I was like, we've entered the part of the map where it just says, here there'll be dragons. At 125%, there's not even dragons there. They didn't even think to put that on the map as an unknown region.
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Hi, this is Mia from the future. It is now Thursday. One of the problems with attempting to do this episode is that we are learning the tariff rate from Twitter in real time. So it turns out that the actual tariff rate on China, as clarified by Donald Trump today, is 145%. And also, it has become clear that the 25% turf tariffs on both Mexico and Canada are also still in effect.
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And I mean, it is very funny that like a lot of people have been focusing on the bond stuff because you can just look at the tariff numbers and it's like, like, yeah, OK, seeing a 125 percent tariff on all goods from China and then looking at the bond markets to figure out if that's bad or not is like it like is like walking outside into a blizzard and being like, well, I need the weather rather tell me if it's snowing.
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It's It's great. Yeah. And we are going to get more into how the Trump administration wants to fuck with that later. But first off, programming note, programming note, I am going to be from this episode forward referring to all of these as the turf tariffs because fuck them. And because these tariffs are in a large part also about a bunch of really weird fucking masculinity bullshit. So. Yeah.
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excited for that yeah and when you make most of your election ads being about yeah trans people and then and then the economy goes to the toilet this is this is what was voted for like if you wanted transphobia this is what you wanted you want you wanted to lose your job you wanted everyone to lose their fucking home speaking of t-bonds am i right let's skip over that immediately no no i'm gonna no one laugh at him i'm gonna go away
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Okay, so the most chaotic thing happening here, other than Robert randomly saying things, is that... nobody knows what the tariff situation is going to be. Just even just on Friday when you're listening to this, right? Like you, what time you were listening to this, there could be 200% tariffs on Indonesia. There could be 4,000% tariffs on Vietnam. We don't know.
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Yeah, and like, you know, so it's all really unstable. We can talk about the other things that are still in effect. So there's a general 10% tariff on all countries except for China are just supposed to have a general 10% tariff. There's also, per Megan Casella, who's a CNBC reporter, there are 25% tariffs on steel, aluminum, and cars. There's probably going to be more.
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He keeps talking about more tariffs, and it's like, who knows when they're going to happen, like maybe pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, but... But the Liberation Day tariffs, tariff tariffs, are currently on hold.
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No, I think the 10% ones are in effect right now, but it's really hard to tell because he's just saying shit.
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Yeah, so, okay, and one of the things that's been happening with the turf tariffs is that, like, the media is just reporting things as true that are just clearly, obviously a lie. So one of the ones that's been going around and that the media is reporting that Trump has said is that
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He said he's going to pause tariffs on countries that don't retaliate, except we know that's a lie because the EU already imposed retaliatory tariffs. But the EU's tariff rate is like already down to 10%, just like everyone else. So we know that Trump is lying about his rationale for the rollback of the tariff tariffs, right?
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And every single fucking media outlet is still just reporting it because nobody fucking knows how to do freaking reporting anymore. We should move to what This is going to do the supply chain. And to put this in perspective, when I learned about the 104% tariff on China, that was before it was 125%, where it's at now.
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I was writing an episode called The Old Economy is Dead, which will probably still be coming out on Monday. Again, that was the 54%. percent rate. I was writing a thing called the old economy is dead at 104 percent. Like things are going to break in the supply chain that only seven people on Earth have ever heard of before. Like entire sectors of the economy are going to be annihilated.
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We're going to see right now we're probably going to see everyone attempt to root all All shipping from China, there's going to be a massive effort to try to rebreed it through literally any other country. But again, that's only a solution for 90 days. And again, it's not even clear that that can work.
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It's awesome. The other fun one is pure joy at something funny happening, like the Shinzo Abe assassination. Easiest writing I've ever done in my life.
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Yeah. Um, other times it's just like, there's a deadline and everyone is counting on me and I have to get it out. And I've gotten to the right level of sleep deprivation where I can just do it. That's right. That's right. Yeah. But I, I, I also think, you know, there's obviously like health insurance, which is sort of a joke given our health insurance, but yeah.
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And then the last thing, and this is the sort of the serious one is that like this, you know, I mean, I do some organizing stuff too, but like this is, This is the thing that I have to do that can materially affect the world, which is a very, very weird thing to say about a podcast, but I've seen it happen, right? I've seen all of you go and do things that wouldn't have happened.
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And I've, you know, it's a weird situation, right? Because my motivation for doing this stuff is the chance that you will make the world better. But I've seen it happen. And I have to continue to believe that the thing that I've been doing for all these years, this project of building a very large hammer, And deploying it against our enemies can work and will work.
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And that is, you know, that's how I get out of bed every morning is we're building the hammer and we're swinging it. Yeah. That's a great way to put it. Very large hammer would be a banging name for a podcast.
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There's weirdly a few this year. Cool. I normally isn't. I like the Boeing ones. That was fun.
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The one that was most emotionally impactful for me was getting to interview Dr. Julia Serrano, who, if you haven't listened to that episode, go listen to it.
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Yeah. Whipping Girl is the book that literally created a bunch of the... The concept of misgendering is from that book, right? The language that we use to talk about transness today is directly her. And so few people have ever read the book. So few people even know who she is. And getting a chance to talk to her was incredible.
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And I'm also really happy about the organizing one that I did because I've gotten so many messages from people who were just like...
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oh wait my knitting is useful to organizing and i'm like yes yes it is you're knitting you're so incredible staggeringly useful yeah so i'm proud of that one yeah let's take a quick break then garrison robert james you can answer that question and we're back james how about you
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Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty good idea. Like, there's definitely sort of... I'm immediately going into this naysaying a little bit. There's definitely problems with it. It's going to be extremely hard to execute because we just don't have a modern history of doing that in the US, and even some of the successful ones in the last decade that people have pulled off haven't been that effective.
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But, on the other hand, as something that we, you know, a concrete thing that we have to organize towards that has a bunch of, like, pretty large unions behind it already... I did an episode about that a few weeks ago. I don't know, a couple months ago. I don't remember when I did this episode. I'm sorry. I can't remember anything I've ever done.
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But I think it's a good opportunity to connect a whole bunch of different kinds of organizing together, both in terms of sort of labor and in terms of the support work you need for that. So, yeah, cautiously optimistic.
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Yeah, I have a couple. So I'm trans fiction-pilled right now. We're giving you fiction from trans authors. Would you say you're transfixed? Wow. I walked right into that one. Nice.
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Yeah, the first one I wanted to talk about is The Gunrunner and Her Hound by Maria Ying, which is the pen name of a couple of authors. Okay, so this is an absolutely unhinged lesbian book about a lesbian crime lord and her new bodyguard, who is also a lesbian, and it rules. There's a whole sort of post-apocalypse US thing going on, but they're still in civilized Hong Kong. It's awesome.
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It's great. You need more unhinged lesbians in your life. Go read this. The other one is one of the boys. This is forthcoming. It's going to release May 13, 2025 by Victoria Zeller. And it's about a trans girl who's like the kicker on her football team. And she has to leave the team because she transitions. But then the team needs her back because they don't have a kicker. And it's fun.
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It's a good time. So you should get that when it comes out.
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There's still time. It's still 2024 as we're writing this.
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Something's happening in January. I have two. Well, one of them, I mean, it's kind of a hack one, but I don't think the Junta of Myanmar makes it out of 2025. Yeah, I think not in the version it is today. Yeah, that's the hack one. The other one is another Assad one. I think someone actually does assassinate Assad.
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Well, he gets too full of himself and he goes to Abu Dhabi and some Muslim Brotherhood guy just whacks him.
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Here's your long shot, man. My long shot is that sometime on Spotify rap day, JK Rowling sees a trans woman just like existing and gets so mad she has an aneurysm and dies. No.
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Yeah. Okay, my big one for the year is this is the year the economy finally collapses. This is the year you find out that no company has made any fucking money in a decade. It's all been being pumped up by a deranged combination of interest rate bullshit, a bunch of fucking money from overnight repo purchases, keeping the banks propped up.
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I don't know if it's going to be the trade war that fucking blows it up, although I think that will instantly detonate.
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everything I don't know maybe it's maybe it's a Chinese housing bubble maybe the tech bubble finally collapses maybe all three of them hit at the same time this is the year it fucking goes I've never actually put my name down it on down on this on the show on any other fucking year this is the year the zombie economy will fall over dead the necromancy cannot hold
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There you go. All right. What impact do you mean? AI is going to result in astronomical job losses. True or false? There will be an evolution of job laws. Next.
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Yeah, I think the other thing that's going to happen pretty quickly is I think he's going to start moving on tariffs very, very fast.
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Yeah, for me, okay, so the easiest way something gets done is just pure rage. I get really angry at something, and I can just do it. Like, it just comes out.
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Yeah, well, I would just say, like, the thing is, like, if you try to act like this in, like, an actual organizing space, this isn't going to work. You're just going to piss everyone off. He's not in organizing spaces. He's not doing that, right? That's what I'm saying, though, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
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This works because of the exact specific thing that he's doing, which is he is the guy who is coordinating a bunch of networks. The thing is, in order for networks to hold together and work, people have to have relationships with each other. And if you behave like this in that situation, it will fuck everything. And this is the conflict that's happening even inside of his own limited network.
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He is fucking with everyone. And we'll get to that with
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Did you come in and were like, all right, you motherfuckers, you people are amateurs. I have to listen to every single thing that you say. No fucking guns. Yeah, it's like...
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No, I mean, I think... I think the reason and this is an interesting part of this. I talked about this last episode was like this is the most like this is by far the most like gay Star Wars we've ever had. Right. And it's the most like I'm trying to think of the number of other shows. The only time they didn't lean away from it or insinuate it. Yeah. No. Like, well, that is kissing this episode.
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It's like I'm like genuinely like I'm like racking my brain. I'm trying to think of like the number of like major TV shows I have ever seen in my life where a non-white lesbian gets to kiss someone. Mm hmm. It's, like, not that high.
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And I think that's why people... Because, like, yeah, this is the best representation of my culture, which is, like, the leftist lesbians who don't get to see each other like I've ever seen.
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Was that the guy from the meeting? Or was it a different... The one from the... He was at the meeting.
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When is the next time I'm getting a non-white lesbian in Star Wars? I am going to be raising a black flag over Shenzhen by the next time we get another one of these fucking characters in the series.
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Okay, I'm going to attempt to do a very, very, very, very brief... Please, God, do not let this be the extent of your knowledge about this conflict, but... Yeah. Okay, here is one paragraph about this. So, when India gained, and Pakistan eventually, gained independence from... the UK, and the British Empire. There was the partition.
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This is a process in which millions died, and India and Pakistan were split into two states.
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Yeah, and people fleeing back and forth between the two countries. There's been destitute territory for fucking ever. One of the most contentious parts of this has always been Kashmir. There's a whole complicated thing here. So Kashmir was sort of split in two. There's an almost entirely Muslim territory that ends up under the control of India.
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And India has waged a brutal military occupation of Kashmir since they got it, basically. It ramps up and down in terms of how... bad it is, but it's never...
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good yeah and this has been a constant source of tension between India and Pakistan where you know Pakistan has played its card of like we are like the defenders of Muslims in India and there's been a series of wars also but this is one of the few times you can say there are genocides on both sides and it's true because like one of the wars that they fought was because of the genocide that Pakistan did in what became Bangladesh so like there are no heroes in this story there is only I mean I guess
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Like, you know, there are people resisting repression from both states.
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Like, you know, let's be clear about that. Kashmir is one of the most militarized places in the world. It got much, much worse after 2019 when India withdrew the autonomous status that Kashmir had had. This sparked a bunch of protests. They were horribly repressed. There's been, like, staggering numbers of people have died over the past, like, 30 years there.
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Like, a lot of, like, Hedberg's access to the outside world has been cut off. It's difficult to get people, like, into it. And obviously, you know, the thing about occupations is that there's been a very, very long-running series of sort of insurgencies and... militant groups in Kashmir of various kinds. Pakistan has funded some of these groups as a way to sort of like poke a stick at India.
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Yeah, I think that's the final number. like, Hindu tourists in Kashmir. It's worth noting that there's no actual evidence that Pakistan is behind this, but... No. But that's India's claim. Yeah, that's India's claim.
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And this is causing things to get really, really bad in Kashmir itself, which is the part of this I think has gotten lost in a lot of the discussion here, which is, like, if you read statements from, like... I mean, like, A, there's just been like an incredible intensification of repression.
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And B, if you read statements from Indian officials, they are they're just straight up talking about, quote, like Indian style final solutions for Kashmir. It's completely unhinged. The Indian state has gone into this. I mean, like, you know, it's Modi, right? Modi is running probably the world's most effective fascist government. Yeah.
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And his thing is always like a huge part of it has always been specifically about like wanting to repress Muslims. And this, you know, has has has kicked the Islamophobia into an absolute fever pitch. And the product of this is that they have started doing strikes inside of Pakistan.
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I'm going to pass it over to Robert and talk about like what those have looked like and what this conflict has been like.
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I think it's also worth noting a couple of things. One is that this is by far the largest, like... clash that these countries have had in a long time, but also, like, there have been, like, periodic, like, cross-border skirmishes around Kashmir for a while now, right? Like, there was a pretty big flare-up in 2020 that kind of lasted until 2021.
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And so there is a chance that this doesn't turn into a full-scale war and that you get something more like what happened sort of recently with Israel and Iran, where they, like, bomb each other
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a few times and then everyone sort of packs up their bags and goes home and continues to like poke each other with militant groups instead of it being like tanks and I think that is like orders of magnitude more likely than like nukes flying yeah just to sort of like Yeah, like, the chance at which these people start shooting nukes at each other is not very high.
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Like, just, like, in the history of nuclear weapons, too, you have to understand that, like, some of the most unhinged people who have ever lived, like, Curtis LeMay, like, the US and the Soviets never did it. Like, Mao and the Soviets never did it. Like, apartheid South Africa had nuclear weapons and never used them.
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Some of the worst people who have ever lived have had access to nukes and never fired them. The odds that you're going to die in nuclear fire are very, very, very, very, very low. It's not good. No. Everything that's happening here is very bad, but, like, you do not need to be, like, living in existential terror of, like, fire raining from the sky.
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That's not, like, a reasonable reaction to this, and I've been seeing a lot of that, so...
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Okay, so... All right, let's let's let's let's actually do this shit. So what is it?
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One of the things that we've been talking about a lot on this show is the de minimis exemption, which was this exemption that formally allowed you was particularly used in trade with China, where you could like if you were sending a package that was under like seven hundred dollars, you didn't have to like it didn't have to like go through customs in the way that you would normally would have to do it.
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That shit's gone. That ended on Friday of last week. This has already skyrocketed the cost of doing imports of shit from China because huge amounts of stuff being shipped from China was, you know, like, reliant on shipping it in packages that were exactly $699. Uh-huh. And, you know, this has, like, Temu's entire business model has changed basically overnight.
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We're like, they're no longer shipping stuff in from China. They're only selling stuff from, like, American... Distributors, this is going to have catastrophic effects on so many supply chains you've never even thought of in the weeks to come because, again, there are so many different, like, tiny screws and shit.
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Like, just, like, really, really small items that you used to be able to get from China for, like, fucking $5 for, like, 100 of them that now have...
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like unbelievable tariff rates on them and have to go through a really really convoluted customs process there have already been sort of massive supply chain disruptions in a large number of industries it's going to continue to get worse sophie was talking about metal imports hitting the construction industry because there's you know there's tariffs on a bunch of different kinds of metal as we've covered on the show aluminum god knows what's going to happen to diet coke
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So, you know, and this is also like this is this is going to have a profound impact on Chinese economy. Again, we're still in sort of the waiting room until sort of midsummer when all of the rest of the tariffs that were supposed to go into effect go back into effect and literally everything collapses.
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Well, and other things are about to get significantly worse. So this has been talked about for a long time. The buzz right now is that they're happening soon. I don't know exactly what that means, but there has been for a long, long time. Trump has been doing talking about doing tariffs on pharma. So congratulations. Get excited for all of your medication costing a lot more money.
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He also put into place a 100% tariff on foreign movies. Well, we'll see.
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It's literally just like he's doing tariffs in a way that there's that guy from the Wolf of Wall Street that's like, guy walks out of the room, goes short everything he's ever touched. It's like that thing. He's going to be tariffing fucking ocean currents in two months.
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Okay, there's more news, though, unfortunately. Yeah. Well, okay, there's one funny thing, and there's the actual news here is part of what's going on here is just everything is just chaos. And this is something that, like, I mean, I've had this conversation with, like, a bunch of people who work in shipping over the last couple of weeks is that, like, it's just chaos, right?
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Like, everything is changing all the fucking time, and this means that every time one of these things changes, a bunch of, like, the import codes and shit, like, stuff just changes on the level of, like... They're customs people. And just like literally the process of importing this stuff changes. And it's just a complete fucking disaster. People are getting laid off constantly too.
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So like every single part of the government that's supposed to be doing this suddenly has less people. It's an absolute rolling catastrophe. It will continue to get worse. There's also good evidence that like they know that it's going to get worse. I'm going to read this quote from USA Today.
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Quote, this is from Trump, I don't think a beautiful baby that's 11 years old needs to have 30 dolls, Trump told Meet the Press host Kirsten Welker. I think they can have three or four dolls because what we are doing with China is just unbelievable. We have a trade deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars for China. I'm just saying, they don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three.
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They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five. Five pencils, everyone.
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Yeah, but I mean, the actual sensitive thing here is like, yeah, no, these people understand that you're going to suffer. They don't give a shit.
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Yeah, so I think the actual scariest part about that is if you read the language of what the court was talking about, they've been describing it as someone who thinks that they are a woman when they're actually a man, isn't someone who can perform at the standards of honor and whatever that a soldier needs.
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And this is, I think, a ramp up to the really, really dangerous thing that is coming, which is their attempt to just straight up brand being trans as fraud.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about transgender. I am your host, Mia Wong. Now, we have spent a lot of time on this show covering a bunch of really bad stuff and also some cool stuff. We've had some cool trans things on this show, too. We're going to have some more in like the coming weeks. But it is a bleak time to be trans really anywhere in the world.
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The United States is also pretty fucking bad right now. But in the words of Langston Hughes, between the darkness and the dawn, there rises a red star.
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And one of the things that has happened as this sort of like, you know, sort of the crisis of transphobia and the crisis of the genocide and the sort of multiple genocides the government's doing and as sort of transphobia as like an institutional state discourse has like solidified is that I mean, honestly, multiple generations of trans journalists have really kind of like risen to the forefront.
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And yeah, we've been seeing a bunch of extremely cool reporting and a bunch of very, very good work from a bunch of like more radical trans journalists. And that's the thing that kind of like... There's been so few of us for so long and suddenly there's several and it rips and I'm really happy about it.
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And with me to talk about sort of, you know, what trans journalism is like in this moment, how it functions and, you know, and how it can be sustained going forward and why it's sort of important is David Forbes, who is the editor of the Asheville Blade and also an independent journalist.
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Mira Lazine, who is a freelance journalist who recently launched the outlet Free Radical, and Maddy Kastigan, who's an independent journalist and the creator of Maddy Kast News. All of you, welcome to the show. Thank you. Happy to be on. Thank you for having me.
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Yeah, I'm ecstatic to have all of you on to get to talk about this because, I don't know, I guess the place that I want to start is like, I...
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i remember this kind of like period in like 2024 2023 2024 where it was like i mean it still is really bleak for trans journalism in a lot of ways but like you know i'm just in trans media in general like i was just watching like the space that had been opened a little bit in like the 2010s for there to be trans people in media just like closing um
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You know, and, like, I've been watching, like, pretty immediately around me. Like, I've been watching the number of, like, trans femmes, especially, like, non-white trans femmes, just, like, disappearing from media. And it was, you know, it was like watching the stars disappear from the sky.
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And the thing about the stars disappearing from the sky is, you know, there's, you don't notice it unless you're looking at them, in which case the light is fucking gone forever. Right. And it was this really, really bleak thing.
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But also, you know, as it's happening and as we've been sort of like resisting this, I've been getting to watch like the stars go back on in the sky and like watching new, like people emerge and watching people who've been doing cool work for a really long time sort of like... come out into the open and, like, get more sort of national recognition. And, yeah, I don't know.
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I guess that's the sort of place I wanted to start is just talking a little bit about, like, what it's like to be fucking doing journalism right now because, Jesus Christ.
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Yeah, there's something that happens fucking constantly. I'm like, my, like, welcome to the... This is before I was out, too. And it's also like, you know, part of what's going on here is like, one of the things you learn really quickly in media is the extent to which so much national media is just like...
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what they do is steal stories from, like, people, like, who are, you know, from sort of, like, more regional media or people they think they can get away with taking stuff from. Like, if... And this goes all the way up the chain, right? Like, if you want to know what's going to be on Rachel Maddow's show, look at what's happening on Behind the Bastards whenever they cover someone on the right.
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And within about three weeks, you will get a Rachel Maddow episode that is five minutes, I think. But, like, you know, it's obviously, like, it's significantly worse with, like, trans people because, like, yeah, they can just fucking steal stories from us. Like, I remember...
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God, my, like, my fucking, like, the first, like, journalism, well, that's not true, but the first journalism-y stuff that I did with, like, cool zone people was, like, we were doing, like, the Atlanta spa shooting.
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We tracked down, there was, like, there was a Facebook post that people were circulating reportedly from the shooter that was, like, basically blaming, like, anti-China media stuff for it. And we tracked down that this person did not have a Facebook and that all of this was fake. But that person, that post had been circulating through the national news.
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And we were like, well, yeah, this is like fake, right?
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And then like every single news, like every single, like CNN, fucking Fox News, like every single major news outlet just like took all of our work and like repackaged it and then never fucking mentioned that it was like Gare and I who did this because, you know, why would you credit the transgender anarchists when you could simply repackage the story yourself?
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And this is a problem that's like goes all the way up to like, this is part of the reason we're here right now, right? Like we're complaining about this on sort of like professional level because like,
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It's annoying, but also, like, the reason we're fucking here right now is because the person who got to write about trans stuff was fucking Jesse Singal, who is a cis man whose only qualification was the thing he previously wrote about was men who fuck other men who don't consider themselves gay.
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And because he was the person who got to write all of the, like, trans coverage, even though he's just, like, some fucking cis dipshit, right? Like, he's now the guy who's, like, been being cited in fucking legal cases for ages and ages for why you should restrict trans healthcare, right?
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Disaster. Disaster. Yeah, Amir, do you want to talk a bit about your experience with it?
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It's legitimately great. You will get reporting there that you won't fucking get from... Well, okay. You will get reporting there that you won't get from anyone else until about three weeks later when all the national outlets pick it up. And it will be better, and you will have it first for the person who actually reported it.
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Yeah, this was a Brazilian trans woman who got sent to Guantanamo.
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This is a incredibly material problem for us, right? And like, I am very lucky in that, like, in terms of transgender journalism, I have like a stable job. But the thing is, right, unless unless you fucking got really lucky and you got hired like as a cis person and then you have a bunch of very, very supportive like coworkers and like your bosses are supportive.
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You are like trying to cobble together like every cent that you can possibly pull out of a fucking couch cushion. Because, like, you know, I've said this on the show before, right? Like, if you're a trans person in the U.S., even before all the turf tariffs hit, right? Like, you were living in, like, 1936 Great Depression levels of unemployment.
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And, you know, and so that means that, like, it actually matters a lot when other outlets do your stories and don't attribute it to you because, like...
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you have to find a way to fucking make money and like almost all trans journalists are like the most hideously broke people you've ever heard of in your entire fucking life like and this is also you know and this is this is also part of the way that like class plays out in in the trans media you see is like you know the people with the biggest platforms tend to be trans people who were already doing okay because those are the only people who can afford to fucking do this
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And, like, that's why most of you have heard of me and most of you probably have not heard of David and Mira, even though David and Mira do, like, quite frankly, more important journalism than I do. And, like, in terms, especially in terms of, like, and, like, break way more fucking stories than I do because it's not kind of, like, not exactly, like, my thing, right? Right.
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But that's because I was like, you know, like I was already sort of like in a place that was financially secure and everyone else is so unbelievably fucking broke all the time.
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And it matters when fucking stories get stolen because the only way that if you're a trans journalist and you're, you know, you're working at your own outlet because an outlet won't fucking hire you because that's just the way that the fucking... Yeah.
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It's funny because even us, even the podcast, It Could Happen Here, which is a pretty big national thing, there's no one else talks about us. It's fucking amazing. You could just see, you could literally watch every other podcast that's a tenth of our size, there's media coverage of, and there's nothing. And they will never admit that we fucking did anything. It's awesome. It's so cool.
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And I think there's a convergence of factors here too, because like, You know, on the one hand, like in terms of sort of the way that hyper visibility works, right, hyper visibility for trans femmes only works negatively. Like there's only the kind of like you get fucked by it. But then also on top of it, you get the reverse version of it where it's like, yeah, you know, your labor was stolen.
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And this is, you know, this is true both in movements. This is true of the way the sort of capitalist media functions. And then on top of that, we have the kind of, like, trifecta of, like, we will never mention that you exist, which is trans, independent, and radical at the same time. And, like, this is what happens to, like, every fucking trans family journalist.
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Like, friend of the show, Maya Arson, CrimeW, has had this happen to it, like, a billion fucking times. Yeah.
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I want to talk a bit more about kind of just like the financials of how this plays out and how independent media is sort of being supported in this era because you know like it's also really true that like even even the like nominally trans outlets like a lot of it functions on labor exploitation and yeah let's let's talk a bit about that I have a lot of strong cakes seen some shit
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Yeah, this is again like shit that's going to be stolen by a national outlet in two days.
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but that's just common that is just normal yeah yeah yeah and it's and it's like the sort of bleak thing about it is your your options are you have money already you won the fucking lottery basically and like you got a stable position you work at a rate that is like genuinely hideous and Or you have a second job. And sometimes it's a lot of these things combined. Yeah. Yeah.
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I think there's a tendency to talk about discrimination as something that's sort of like abstract or something that's even just kind of like point of hiring stuff, which is all true. And like, you know, it is like, yeah, like part of the problem with this is that it's impossible to get like fucking staff positions and like. I mean, I got hired as a cis person, right?
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And they would have hired me if I was trans, but that's also just true for a lot of people, which is that that's the way that you can do it. So there is the front door discrimination, but then also the second aspect of it is that the way that all of this stuff plays out structurally in the economy is that you get reduced contract labor unless you try to go it by yourself.
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And because of the incredible just material financial oppression of trans people, this is another big part of the reason why there's just so few, you know, and like there's becoming more, right? And I'm incredibly happy that like, you know, like I'm fucking talking with three trans journalists. This rules. And also the reason there's not more of us, which is important because
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Like, cis people trying to cover our stories is a fucking disaster. Like, that's how we got here. But, like, part of the reason why there's not more is just that, like, it's so difficult to survive doing this. And... Yeah. You know, and that's also... I'm going to turn this into a minor plug, which is, like, go subscribe to The Asheville Blade. Go subscribe to Free Radical.
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Go subscribe to Manicast News. Because, like... Literally, the difference between people being able to have an apartment and pay their rent or living in a car is the amount of support that you get from this stuff.
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This is also part of the issue with the way that trans issues are reported on by the media is that they're largely... It's not that things like healthcare aren't important, right? But just the raw class dynamic of all of this just does not get talked about. The homelessness rates, I don't actually... I should have the homelessness race off top of my head.
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Things like three or four times at the very least more likely across the entire trans population to be homeless than cis people. And like, you can just fucking see that if, you know, trans people, it's like, yeah, fucking everyone's spent a bunch of time being homeless. And like, you know, that's just the conditions of this. And, you know, this is a thing that like, as you, the listener, like,
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It is possible for this. It doesn't have to fucking be like this. It doesn't. You have the power in your hands to get people off the street and with a roof above their head. And you can do this by clicking the links in the description.
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You know, I think part of the difficulty of it, right, and this specifically the way that trans issues function around class and journalism are a microcosm. It's like the most intense version of the stuff that's happening to the entire journalism industry, right? Where like, you know, part of what we're seeing is like, it's just, it's been the destruction of local news, right?
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And the product of this is that the only people who can be journalists are like a bunch of fucking rich dipshits. And, you know, like, yeah, you've all fucking read like New York Times columnist is like platforming a genocide denier today. Right. Like that. And that's that's sort of the product of this.
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And it means that like unless like literally like people like you, the fucking listener, and I guess this doesn't apply to you if you're, you know, like statistically a good number of you are like you are also transgender and you make like fucking nine dollars an hour, like running a forklift or something. Like, this is not, this is not on you.
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Like, I know a bunch of you are going to be like, holy shit, I should give money to these people. It's like, okay. But like, this stuff is only possible if people are actually fucking willing to support it. Like, until we can, like, fundamentally change the way that the entire political and economic system works in this country and in this world.
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And until then, it's like, yeah, like it's, this is a fucking problem for like us here too. Cause you know, like, again, like I got fucking lucky. Like I am extremely dissimilar. Like I am the trans woman, like one of the trans women who you will hear from the most. And I have like a stable job. I haven't been homeless and I haven't done sex work.
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And this makes me completely unlike a huge portion of trans people, especially trans femmes. Right. And yeah, it's like, yeah, it fucking colors the way I do this shit. In ways that like I don't see because like I haven't had to like do this shit. And this is a real fucking problem.
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The only way that it can not be like this is if people are actually willing to support the people who understand these things because they fucking gone through it. And so your options are like, all of our stuff gets reported on by Jesse Singal and we all fucking die, or we fight trans journalism and we fight them and we all live in a fucking better world.
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Yeah. And, you know, and again, it's like it's it's not impossible. It just requires a bunch of fucking work from the trans people who are doing it. And then also it requires, you know, putting on my fucking NPR pledge drive voice. It requires viewers like you to, you know, it requires people to care enough about it to support it and make it exist. Yeah.
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Yeah, I think that's a kind of good note to start sort of wrapping up. Do you have anything else that you want to make sure you get in before we move to plugs?
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Double the income of a trans person today. This is also part of what I was talking about with the Great Depression. We don't live in the same economy that everyone else does. It is literally a different fucking world. And the more fucked you are down the fucking scale...
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of like of like trans poverty the more it's like you literally like the the reality that like the people live in is just completely alien to you it's like what the fuck i want that kind of money you're a david yeah do you have anything else you want to say before we like wrap up
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Yeah, and this is also a directly political thing because the work that y'all do, I have literally watched it change the political landscape. That's just a thing that happens. I think we're all very cynical about the power of the truth to do anything because it requires people to act on it. But if you don't know anything is happening, it is not possible to act on something.
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Yeah, so like, you know, you are simultaneously, you are supporting, like, you are supporting trans people in, like, the most precarious position we've been in in fucking ages. You are, like, supporting, you're supporting journalism and you are not even poking a stick. You are helping build a lance to, like, stab into the side of the people who are, like, destroying this world.
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And, yeah, I think that's fucking important. So if people want to support you, where do they go? Where do they go? Go, go, go, go.
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Yes. There is a limit to the extent to which you can actually talk about the structural problems that are happening, and you can't fucking talk about how to solve them. And this is also partially why, like, I've called myself a journalist.
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Like, I kind of jokingly refuse to call myself a journalist because, like, I fucking refuse to be associated with, like, all of those goddamn Atlantic motherfuckers whose institutional job is to endanger trans people. Like, you know, but also... See no ground to fascists, though. That's true, that's true. Yeah, you know, because it's like, we're the ones actually fucking doing this shit.
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But also, yeah, like, this is, you know, to do my one Karl Marx quote... It's like, you know, philosophy has hitherto only sought to describe the world. The point is to change it. And that's a thing that we could like we like have the power to collectively do together.
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I want to read this fucking post that I saw from that Kendra writes about the New York Times. I think a lot about the top New York Times editor who I told the historians were warning were in a similar period to the ramp up to the Holocaust. And maybe we could look back and see what MIT had done wrong to not repeat his mistakes. He shrugged. New York Times didn't really cover the Holocaust.
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what so don't support these people support the people who actually do this shit you know like i'm gonna i'm gonna make a cut of the comparison but it was like at the time this shit was happening there was a bunch of very good coverage of the holocaust of what was happening but it was because it was all happening from fucking like because it was like largely jewish radicals who were doing it all that shit fucking got ignored and shit that could have been fucking prevented wasn't
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and we don't have to live in a world where that shit fucking happens and we can make it not be like that but like the structural the structural like structural nature of the media is one of the ways that this fucking happens and we don't have to let the new york times do this again
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I have not seen that shit yet, so... Yeah, that's for next week, though.
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Yeah. They're sort of fascinating because it's like... The way that their banners are designed really, really remind me of, like, pictures you see from, like, 1917. It's, like, very, very similar to that. And also, they have a thing that's a very common...
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This is one of the first times we see this. The Gorman front people, these people have no idea what the fuck they're doing. They are amateurs. Very green. Yeah, like their operational security is unbelievably dog shit. They like wiretapped one guy and were like, hey, let me introduce you to the leader of our organization. We have met you one time. We have listened to one phone call. You're in now.
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I think they probably listened to more than one. Yeah, but it's still like... They've definitely been watching him for a while. They didn't vet him much. They just were kind of like, hey, you're going to meet our leader now at the first meeting you've shown up to? He met the public-facing aspect of it, I guess.
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And this is the thing you run into, like, in the field a lot, where there's people who, like... have read a lot of stuff about operational security, but haven't done anything. And so they don't under... And there's varying levels of this, right? But you get this with new people where it's like... They don't know what the important things are.
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So they do some of the stuff, right, that they've read, but they don't understand how to put all of it together to, like, do something securely. And so you'll get these things where, like, some of their stuff is, like, unbelievably secure to a point where it's useless, and then some of it is, like, very open.
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Yeah, they're just like, hey, have... I don't know, yeah, they'll just bring people into stuff that instantly compromises everything that they're doing because they haven't, like, thought it through.
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No. The thing I think is actually is interesting about the crime statistics stuff is that this is actually a more sophisticated operation than what happened in real life, where in real life, all the actual crime statistics were like crime is falling. But everyone just kept saying there was more crime. Totally. Yeah, totally. This is.
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Like arresting more people to jack the crime rates, that is a more sophisticated thing than what we actually dealt with, which was the media just lied.
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I think the other angle of that, too, though, is that, like, they don't know what they're doing, right? No. Like, their plan is genuinely really bad, right? Like, the plan is they want to, like, steal an Imperial weapons shipment and then reveal that the Empire is shipping weapons in.
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But if you do that, then you just, like, and Andrew points this out, like, okay, so if you do this, then you reveal that you hijacked the shipment, so they're just going to, like, raid you all. And they're okay with that.
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It's just amazing. Fucking Gordon Livy shit. It's like Livy finally getting to spy.
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Yeah, well, because part of it, because, like, part of what's going on here is, like, Luthan is losing it, right? And this is the thing, because, like, he's juggling too many threads at once. And, like, yeah, everyone's fucking seen this. Like, yeah, your friend is juggling 15 projects at once. They're losing their goddamn minds.
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And then, like, the girl in your group who's on top of it has to just slap them and be, like, locked the fuck in.
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Yeah, but he also is deliberately fucking with him. Yeah, totally. He's very manipulative. He's being unbelievably manipulative. One of the things here is he deliberately tells Bix about this assignment that he was going to give her and then doesn't specifically to see if she would tell Andor about it and to test how Andor would react to that. Which is like, don't do that. That's unhinged.
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That's like not... And this is also part of the thing you have to balance here, right? It's like... You know, you have to be able to balance like getting people to do things that need to be done with like not being a fucking asshole and alienating everyone. And this is like a especially when you yourself because like like Luther is also falling apart.
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Yeah, I mean, I feel like there's no possible way this can go quote-unquote well. This is going to be a fucking catastrophe. The basic plan here is to do a genocide, and then... Well, I mean, this is part of a genocidal operation.
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Yeah, but, you know, on a sort of practical level, it's like, okay, the U.S. couldn't hold Afghanistan, right? Like, obviously, this is a quote-unquote easier occupation, but it's like, this is going to be a fucking shit, like a nightmare, right?
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like and I don't know I mean my assumption is that this is going to be just like if he actually like you know does a deployment of US troops this is going to be hideously unpopular people are going to be coming back in body bags and it's going to fucking I don't know it's going to be a nightmare for everyone involved and yeah it's a absolutely terrible idea
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I think the weakness that they have right now is that because they're causing so much chaos, because you're talking about the FBI purge they're trying to do, The thing that they're relying on is everyone is just going to let them in and just let them get walked over.
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But it's like, okay, the thing about acting this much outside the law is what guys with guns do you have who you can use to enforce this?
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That's the thing where it's legitimately like if there's serious resistance to them, they might start to crumple because the reason you work inside of the legal order or you have your own paramilitaries is so that you can have the guy with the gun to make you open the door.
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And the more people who are willing to just be like, no, fuck you, like and like force them to actually like find guys with guns who are willing to do this.
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Yeah, and if you look at the last world historical empire run by an incredibly unpopular genotocracy, it was the Soviets, and look at how they fell apart.
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Yeah, so on Monday, Trump sort of averted the market collapse that he had set off with his declaration that there are going to be 25% tariffs on all goods from Canada and Mexico and also 10% tariff on China. So let's go into what actually happened. So the tariffs on Mexico and Canada are on hold for a month. However, The 10% tariff on all Chinese goods did go into effect.
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And we'll get to more about what that's going to do in a second. But much more importantly, Trump eliminated the de minimis exception, which allowed, like, people and companies to ship goods from China that were worth under $800 and not have to go through the formal customs process and, you know, pay tariffs on it and also have to spend all of that time... paperwork and shit.
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And before we get into the sort of devastating effect this is going to have on businesses, I want to make it clear that regular people in China use this to send things to people in the US. That's a very normal thing that is now really, really difficult.
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Yeah. Okay, so on the business side, this is actually really interesting because I think it's one of the... I mean, not the first, but I think it's going to be a very, very early example of Trump completely fucking a base that's been very, very supportive of him. Because this is going to liquidate huge portions of the dropshipping economy, right?
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Like all of all of the stupid YouTube shirts, like all of that stuff is just going to be annihilated. Can you explain dropshipping if people aren't familiar, Mia?
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Yeah, so dropshipping is a thing where you do an order and instead of having like an inventory, normally you'd have a warehouse that has shirts in it. Dropshipping, you don't do that. You are now the intermediary and you have these manufacturers like print to consumption, basically. And you can you can do this very cheaply and then you can run the entire markup.
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But it works because of how cheap it is to get these like sort of small scale Chinese firms to like make stuff for you. Those people are screwed. Companies like Temu and Shein are either going to have to just completely eat shit or they're going to have to figure out a way to move their entire supply line through countries like Vietnam or. which is going to be very difficult.
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I mean, cause Temu even getting stuff to the U S has been kind of hard for them because of how the logistics network works. Yeah.
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Yep. Yeah. There's some stuff that, like, fuck them. But on the other hand, there are a lot of people who are going to eat shit who are not those people, and this is... There is a huge, like, range of industries that are run by very, very small businesses... like it was even just like an individual person who like makes crafts and sells it.
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And those people are also screwed because they, they rely on getting the resources in from China. And there's a lot of sort of, you know, it things like, like people who build like hand, like retro handheld consoles. Oh yeah. And like, I don't know, like custom airsoft rifles.
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I know JD talk, but like there's a whole bunch of industries like that, that are these like small scale production things that are, I just screwed. That rely on this stuff. And so the ripples of this specific part of it are going to keep playing out basically no matter what else happens in this trade war. Yeah. It's also worth noting that Trump's tariffs on Mexico and Canada aren't gone.
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They've just been postponed for a month. So there is a real chance that we end up in exactly the same place that we were going into the weekend where no one knows where these tariffs are going to take effect and basically blow a smoking crater in the world economy. And we get another round of the negotiations that James is going to talk about.
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It's already setting off a really sort of staggering right wing. I mean, not even necessarily right wing, but just like a nationalist backlash in Canada. that's kind of been like tearing up this sort of international right-wing alliance of nationalists because suddenly Trump's coming after them and now they're really mad about it.
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Speaking of getting canceled, what hasn't gotten canceled is the 10% tariff on all Chinese goods, which is just now in effect. It's just happening. That's bad. It's going to increase inflation. It's sort of the opening round of this escalation to a trade war. China has retaliated with... Tariffs that are not a very big deal on U.S.
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goods and some product control stuff on expert control stuff on some rare earth minerals. Actually, I don't know if they're rare earth minerals, but like minerals you need for production stuff that isn't a big deal yet, but could be.
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We obviously have a lot of sources. Yeah, we have Monday. Yeah, yeah. On Monday, we're going to cover this more. So I think something that's important to understand about these tariffs is that these tariffs are not economic policy.
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This is this is the mistake that all of the capitalists who back Trump made is that they assumed that just like every other president who's made promises like this, like Obama's promise to renegotiate NAFTA. They all assumed that because of economic policy, they'd be able to just like get Trump to be pro-business and he wouldn't do it.
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The miscalculation they made is that these are not economic policies. Tariffs. These are directly foreign policy geopolitical tariffs, right? Their international relations are to the deal bullshit. And the goal of it, and he's been deploying this against, like, I mean, Colombia, Denmark. He's threatening the EU now. He's going to keep doing this with China.
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The goal of this is to directly use American consumer power as a weapon of imperialism to make these countries fall into line. Yeah, and now we'll pass it to James to talk about what he was specifically trying to get out of Mexico and Canada in this round.
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Yeah, and I want to – there's been a lot of sort of cheerleading of Scheinbaum sort of like standing up to the U.S., and I don't think people in the U.S. really understand the securitization on the Mexican border. And so something that I'm realizing that I don't think – I just assume people knew about this, but I don't think I ever made it into the Western press much is that –
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the Mexican army just like open fire on a convoy of like on a convoy of immigrants. And this was, this was on the border of Guatemala and just like killed six of them, shot 12 other people. So like, and like there are massacres like that, like not infrequently, right? Like this is not a, this is not a Mexico is pro immigrant. Like the U S is anti-immigrant thing.
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Like part of the, part of the reason why Trump can like, you know, sort of declare victory without getting any concessions or whatever is because of how murderous the Mexican army's like border policy is already.
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Yeah, that's actually part of what I was going to say. I've talked to a few union teachers who are like, yeah, we're going to go do this. We're going to go fight. So I expect in the next couple of weeks we're going to see more movement from the teachers' unions. And I think there's, you know, there's an under... I mean, on the one hand, there is the threat that
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you know, these people do want to privatize the education system, right? So there is a chance that this is, you know, trying to draw a backlash out of this is something that they're going to try to use to just completely eliminate like national federal education. But also, you know, this is something we've, I want to close this episode on that we've been talking about this whole time, right?
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Is that This this whole coup is being carried out by a bunch of people with laptops and pieces of paper walking up to bureaucrats and the bureaucrats doing what they're being told. Right. This is this is not a coup that's working with like an army that is showing up on your street.
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And you can go like find the local bureaucrats who are the people who are supposed to enforce this stuff and you can protest them and you can put some steel in their spine and make them make the administration actually try to do this. It's not that hard. And they'll fucking cave.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the singular it is seemingly irrelevant now because everything is happening all of the time. I'm your host, Mia Wong, and one of the many, many, many chaotic things that has been going on over the last two weeks since Trump took power has been a bunch of funding freezes to the U.S. federal government grant system. And
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I think to a lot of people that doesn't sound like an enormously big deal, but that is unbelievably catastrophic for, like, I would go so far to say it's like the survival of the human species for reasons I will get to in a second, but unbelievably bad for the quality of life of everyone on Earth.
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And to get a sense of exactly what this kind of stuff does, what these funding freezes do, and what the sort of threat, particularly to the future of American science is, is. I have brought in two people who are intimately familiar with this. Argyvon Salas, who's a surgeon and professor of medicine and friend of the show. Yeah, come on. Yeah, definitely.
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I don't know why I had such a hesitant friend of the show because it wasn't in my notes. That was, I was ad-libbing it. But yeah, friend of the show, Kamehota, who is a gastroenterologist and the host of the podcast, House of Pods. And both of you two, welcome to the show. Oh, thank you so much for having us.
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Yeah, and the place I want to start, I think, is with, because it was happening, I think, in NSF NIH a bit before this happened, but the OPM, the Office of Personnel Management, sent out this memo last week that was a, it was nominally a response to this very weird Trump executive order that's
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Him being, like, every single program that has to do with civil rights, which is, like, so my description of it is anything that has to do with civil rights at all, like, gone. His description of it is, like, DEI and woke. So, like, anything that has to do with queer people, anything that has to do with, like, racial inequality.
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And they were supposed to, like, go through and review every single, like, government grant program for anything.
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gender ideology which is a meaningless phrase and and the green new deal is all part of it too yep yep yep you know and this is part of the raft of executive orders particularly the anti-trans executive orders but opm's response to this again awful as personnel management's response was to just freeze literally every single grant program in the country and this was everything from pell grants and like work study for college students to like food aid for single mothers to
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My personal favorite, and I don't know why this never made it into the press, because I'm apparently the only one who went through and read the list, but one of the things that he froze funding for was security patrols for nuclear weapons manufacturing sites. So, like, we almost, like... Why?
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yeah why is that included it was because literally what happened was they found a list of every single grant that like anyone does like and any like program that gives out grants and they froze all of them it's like another one of them that when i when i said this is like this is a threat to all life on earth i was not i was not joking here one of the other ones was defunding one of the very important like international nuclear non-proliferation organizations like specifically the one that's there to make sure that like random people don't get like enriched uranium or like obtain nuclear weapons
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So like we we dodged a like giant nuke sized bullet when when like most of these programs got their money back after a judge was like, well, you obviously can't do this. This is so unbelievably illegal that it's astounding. Like the Constitution, like very blatantly says that the power of the purse is Congress, not the president. Like, stop.
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I think that's the danger of this right now is that this is revenge. Right. They are lashing out in sort of in pure anger and pure hatred. And they have been given control of an apparatus that they don't understand at all. Right. Like that. That's how you get defunding nuclear police.
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That's how you get them defunding like the Barry Goldwater Memorial Grant thing that gives money to kids for writing essays about Barry Goldwater stuff. They don't understand what the state is and what it does. And they're just trying to take the whole thing apart. And they're trying to sort of rampage their way through it.
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And it means that we're in this situation now where, like, for a long time, the line on, like, trans rights was like, well, you should defend trans rights because they're going to come for you next. And that's no longer true. What is actually happening here is in order to kill us, they are they are willing to kill every they are willing to let all of you die in nuclear fire.
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It's specifically in order to hurt us, right? That's the sort of line we're at where, you know, all of these sort of complicated systems and all of these sort of complicated funding mechanisms are just getting lit on fire by people who don't understand what they're doing and don't care. Right. Just add a spider or something.
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Yeah, and the stuff that they're doing, like the destruction of this research data, the way that it's been just taken down and destroyed, little parts of it have come back up after the sort of backlash, but what they're doing is staging a digital version of the Nazis burning all of the books at the Institute for Sexual Research. That's explicitly what they're doing. It's literally the same stuff.
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It is research on queerness and trans people that they are lighting on fire.
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And you know who else lights research on queer and trans people on fire? It's the sponsors of this show. It's the products and services. Yeah.
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And we are back. So I want to move from that to kind of the next phase after we got out of the sort of OPM, like suspending everything phase, which has been this kind of this uncertainty around a whole bunch of the other funding agencies for science, National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health.
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Can you talk a bit about what's been going on with grants there before we move into like how this whole process works?
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Yeah, and, you know, between NIH and National Science Foundation and, you know, Department of Energy is having a similar thing to this because Department of Energy funds all, like, high-energy physics research, so all of your sort of, like, particle accelerators, stuff like that.
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It's not just sort of, like, the national labs, for example, that get funding from these places, although, you know, national labs are, like, you know, you get your funding from grants like everyone else. But, you know, I mean, this is all the way down to the level of, like,
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Undergrads in college chemistry labs, they are getting paid out of these grants from the National Science Foundation, from the National Institutes.
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health like all of these all of these institutions pay out everything and it's like this is the basis of how all science almost all science like there's some private sector stuff but the thing is like the giant private like bell labs right like your old school giant private sector here's our giant r&d thing like that's all kind of gone
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So, you know, like the only people who are getting funded by this are like weird startup guys. And it's like, okay, look, look, look, look what they've invented in the last like 15 years. It's like cryptocurrency NFTs, which is cryptocurrency again. Theranos. Don't forget. Yeah, Theranos, the metaverse, Juicero. Like, they're doing great. Juicero. They're doing great.
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And people will be like, oh, they invented AI. It's like, no. National labs were using those AI algorithms like a decade and a half ago. It's like, yeah, the generative AI, blah, blah, blah. Okay. We're not here to get into me complaining about generative AI. Go listen to Edgerton's entire show. Yeah, save it for Better Offline. Yeah. Yeah.
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And it's a generational thing, too, because the students also need this funding. And so people, people who are undergrads, particularly people who are like doctoral students, like their research, right, like the stuff that they're doing while they're in graduate school, like getting PhDs, they can become scientists. That's all also like funded by these grants.
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And if that stuff goes away, like it's not just that you're obliterating this generation of science, like you're kneecapping the next like three generations of scientists because Because each one of them down the line suddenly doesn't have the research experience that they're supposed to have. Exactly. Yeah.
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And also, you know, and this is another aspect of this too, I really doubt they understand this, but, you know, there's also a lot of postdocs who are not from the U.S., right? Who are either international students or international students who are just, you know, coming in from... other countries. And those people, if you suddenly don't have a grant, you don't have a job.
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And that is really, really bad for your immigration status. Like that, that is enough to get you kicked out of the U S. And this is the thing that's constantly leveraged in, in sort of labor organizing, right? Or like one of the threats that universities will make. Usually they do it implicitly. Sometimes they'll just go out and say it very legally.
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We'll be like, okay, if, if, if you, this postdoc or like you, this grad student, tries to join this union, your legal status in the U.S. is going to be compromised. But that's another sort of risk from this, is those people's ability to stay in the U.S. and not get deported, basically.
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You know, and it's sort of a nationalist thing, right? But, like, for 99% of the time, for better, like, the U.S.
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has been very, very good at absorbing other country scientists when, you know, this, like, we got a, you know, okay, so, like, it's hard to take too much credit for it because we also took a bunch of scientists from the Nazis, like, from the actual Nazis, but we also, like, a bunch of very famous U.S. scientists, like, were in the U.S. because they were fleeing the rise of the Nazis. Yeah. And...
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We are looking at a situation where we are going to be the opposite of this. Our scientists are going to be fleeing everywhere else because our government is being run by these people.
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Oh, they don't want you to do that. Like, oh no. Oh no.
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Yeah. I think the bleak thing about specifically the fact that it's these study retractions and it's just, you know, this attempt to ban anyone from doing any research, right?
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Is that like the, the problem for them with medical research about trans people is that everyone who's doing this, who isn't a like unbelievably rabid anti-trans person from the beginning, you know, looks at everything that they want to do to trans people and goes, this is going to kill unbelievable numbers of us.
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And I think part of what they're doing here is they're trying to, before any of this stuff would come out, they're trying to stop the scientific apparatus from revealing the fact that they are trying to wipe us out. And that's an unbelievably bleak thing to live through, I guess.
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It's really terrible I I will say this like Jenny Wiley because it never happens obviously the best the best thing you can do for trans people is like Something that involves the fall of the regime like the second best thing is like hire us Because no one does it and we can't no one can get jobs right now
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and and but like like the third minimum thing after like money or like housing is like like check in on the trans people in your life because nobody actually ever does it and it means a lot and it's not gonna like stop the wrath of the state but like i don't know it'll help people feel less alone this this has been the be a trans public service announcement it's now over
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Yeah, people are going to die. People probably have already died. If you're trans and you're listening to this, fucking don't die. Think about how good it's going to be to get a piss on these people's graves in like eight years. It's going to roll. But...
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To close this out, this is something that I think is very important because no one in the U.S. apparently seems to understand this at all. How does the grant process actually work and what is it? Because, you know, this process is the difference between you, like, having clean water to drink and, like, that study that was going to determine if your water was clean or not not happening.
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the wrong font size or the wrong margin that they can literally choose not to even read it and then you're you're then having to wait till either six months later if there's another opportunity or sometimes a full year later before you can try again also it's worth noting you also have to like do a bunch of science like if if it was just you must do 12 you must write right 12 pages of stuff and format it it would probably be okay but like you also have to do science like both for it and also while you're doing it yeah
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know it's like the only thing that could even potentially work like that is to say say whatever you're doing is cancer research like that's the actual thing right like sometimes you could like defraud the dod by telling them like whatever research you're doing is camouflage but like it's not it's even that is like it makes it like one percent more likely that your endless hours of work
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Yeah, and the disruptions to the funding system, the disruptions to the studies, the disruption to just the payout means that all of this work that you're doing, you have no idea whether, again, all of this, in some cases, unpaid labor that you have been doing for months and months and months could just not happen. Yeah.
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And also, like, it's worth noting, too, like, you also have to, like, when you're figuring out what you're going to be doing next, like, working out whether or not your grant even has a chance of getting approved, like, that is, like, is something that is a long-term decision that determines, like, what, like, you know, what colleges you go to, like, what institutions you end up at, like, all of that kind of stuff.
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And, like, that thing being, all this stuff being up in the air. Yeah.
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I remain hopeful. I remain hopeful. Also, I got, I got to put in my word of Costco hate here, which is they're currently screwing over their unions. So I thought they resolved it. I thought they actually gave them the, no, they didn't.
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I mean, that is a thing, though, right? If you want to understand why the NFL is doing that, like, look at who the current heads of the NFL Players Association are and, like, who their past heads for the last, like, decade have been, and that will give you an indication of, like, why it's like that.
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Unfortunately, I've become a footballer. Also, I kind of owe the NFL Players Association because they did put out a statement in support of our unionization drive, so... Yeah, it was first week. That's nice.
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Yeah, and I mean, like, the most visual example I could think about this was I knew some people who wanted to work in a coronavirus lab in 2019 and couldn't do it because their PI didn't have funding for a coronavirus thing. It's like, oh, it would have been useful if they'd gotten that grant. Like... So I think this is a decent enough place to wrap up.
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I do have one thing that I want to plug, which is something you were talking about earlier, which is these institutions coming out and backing their scientists, right? And that's a thing that you can do. You can put pressure on these institutions to do the right thing. And so it might be over by now, but literally as we were recording this, there was a protest going on at NYU's hospital.
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Yeah. And so, you know, you can do this. The people who actually run these systems and, you know, the entire federal government, right? People running the federal government are relying on everyone just sort of sitting there being shocked, not knowing what to do and doing nothing.
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And, you know, you can go show up to the administrators, the offices of the administrators of these places, and you can confront them and you can be like, okay, you're, you were either right here right now, you're going to be a coward and you're going to go along with this, or you're going to go back your own people. Yeah.
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And that, and that's something that you could do right now.
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Great. We love the EOS government. It gets worse. Jesus Christ.
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Yeah, we'll put links to that in the description.
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Also, I'm going to put in a personal plug to call your congressperson to yell at them about all of the anti-trans stuff because they are legitimately in a flux point right now where the party is flipping back and forth between just being like, yeah, whatever, we'll pass a defense bill that like bans trans people from the military and we're going to stop things from happening.
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And so this is a thing that can go either way and getting yelled at by their constituents legitimately does help with this. So...
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Yeah, do that too while you're calling with the CDC. Multiple things. Different calls, even.
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Yep. Yep. Yep. So speaking of things in bios, where can people find you to for stuff that you want to promote the way you do, et cetera, et cetera.
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Yeah, and you can find all of the... We've talked about, like, a staggering number of the other shows that we do in this one. But, yeah, you can find our other shows where there are podcasts. And... Yeah, think... God, I'm so bad at plugging these things. You'd think it's my living, but no. Can't do it. Zero out of ten. Absolute failure. But yeah, thank you to both for coming on.
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And I hope you get your grant, because fuck that. Like, Jesus Christ.
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Yeah, yeah. I'm down. We'll start a podcast. Yeah, this is what could happen here. Go harass your legislatures, your local administrators for universities, your local police department. Make sure they do not bad stuff and do good things.
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Before we get to that, unfortunately, we are under capitalism, which means we have to do these ads.
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Do you two have anything else you want to make sure the audience knows before we head out?
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Yeah, and I want to close with one more thing that is related to this, but is also more general advice. Don't talk to cops.
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You know, I think that the common thing people say is it is legal for them to lie to you. And that is true. But it's not just that it's legal for them to lie to you. It is their job to lie to you. You cannot trust a single word that comes out of their mouths because it is their job to get you to confess to a crime or to get information out of you that will let you confess to a crime.
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So invoke your right to remain silent. Get a fucking lawyer. Don't talk to them. Yes. And, you know, this is advice that's not just coming from me, right? Like, this is the advice you will get from every single person who does any kind of criminal offense. This is what you'll get from a public defender. This is what you'll get from anyone who has even sort of interacted with the legal system.
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And this is also true even if they tell you that, oh, you're not a suspect, you're just a blah, blah, blah, we're trying to get information. It is their job to lie to you. Think about it roughly the same way of, like, if you're dealing with, like, a country secret police, how much information would you give them? The answer is... Do not.
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Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you to you both for coming on. And may we live to see a world better than this one where you could just do this stuff and not have to have any concerns.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that has increasingly become about it happening in other places in the world. I'm your host, Mia Wong. With me is Gare. Hello, hello. So if I'm remembering correctly, and it is entirely possible I have forgotten several coups that I've covered, I think this is the second coup that I've covered in six months. That feels right.
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And, you know, when we last left the dumbest coup I had ever seen in my entire life, we were in Bolivia, and it was a truly spectacularly stupid coup. That coup ended with the army running away from a bunch of protesters who were just like... yelling at them meanly. So that one had a thing I've never seen before, which is the army.
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The protesters were trying to bring something up to break a barricade, and the army ran away before they could get the anti-barricade thing up to the police barricade. So that was a disaster. Today, we are talking about what I, having now studied this, since it started, I genuinely believe this somehow is an even stupider coup
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You have to go back to the CIA coup in Venezuela where everyone just got arrested by fishermen to fight a stupider coup than this. It is... Even that one, at least they landed guys with guns. It was over so quick. Like... Yeah, I think the official number is that the amount of time the martial law was technically in effect before the assembly voted to get rid of it was 190 minutes.
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Like people could have like slept through this coup, which is really funny, right? I made an executive decision, right? And I was like, I'm going to sleep in for one more hour. So I woke up at 8 a.m. instead of 7 a.m. And I missed like half of it because I was just I slept for one hour. Yeah.
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oh so let's let's let's get into a bit about what happened here because you know as as dumb as this looks now because it failed this was for people who don't know there was there was an attempted coup in south korea i don't know what day it's gonna be when i don't know what day it's gonna be in korea when this comes out because yeah but but on on tuesday on our tuesday we
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On our Tuesday, it was, I think, 10.30 at night there, the hideously unpopular president of Korea, Seok-yeol Yoon, declared martial law. Yoon is... His approval rating is like half of Joe Biden's approval rating. Like, his approval rating is like 20%. He is... staggeringly unpopular.
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He... Yeah, so Yoon won one election in 2022 very narrowly in a race where neither of the candidates were particularly good. And he is a hardline far-right dipshit. He's... You know, I mean, one of his big things is he has this unbelievably hardline in North Korea, which is not, you know, doing anything productive at all. He's also...
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You know, and this is like if you want to look at like who are his 20 percent of supporters left. He was the guy of the unbelievably unhinged Korean misogynist movement. I guess you would call them who are some of the worst people on Earth.
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I mean, these are guys who will just there was there was a court case recently that decided that you can't just like beat someone up for having short hair because you think they're a feminist. Like, that's the kind of, like, unhinged misogynist that we're dealing with. That's Yoon's base. However, comma, a couple of things have happened since then.
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One is that he's racked by, like, a thousand scandals. Everyone in his cabinet keeps getting impeached for doing corruption. There are so many different corruption scandals with him going on right now that I was considering, like, reading out a list of all of them as a joke, but it's too long.
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One of the important ones is that he was, like, basically doing, like, a pay-for-play thing to, like, fuck with his own party's primary process.
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And this has pissed off basically his entire party, which is great, which is exactly the thing you want to be doing right before you attempt to stage a coup, is piss off your own political party. So... All right, let's get to the coup. His major problem, one of his very major problems is that he hasn't been able to do anything basically since he's been in power.
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And the reason he hasn't been able to do anything is that his first sort of like off election was this unbelievably crushing electoral defeat for his party, the National Assembly, which is their like parliament. is just straight up controlled by the opposition democratic, like liberal Democrat. Well, okay. Let me, let me be very specific about this.
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It's controlled by the opposition democratic party who are the sort of like Korean liberal party and also a bunch of like minor allied opposition parties. And they keep on again, impeaching all of his cabinet members, which is very funny. You know, he was trying to get a budget through and the budget got eviscerated and he hasn't been able to do it.
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So he has been very, very angry and very frustrated and, And so his plan apparently to deal with this was just to knock out the National Assembly.
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This is Jenny Wiley. Nobody has any idea why the fuck he thought this would work. The best thesis, and we'll get to this in a bit, the best thesis that I've seen is that he wanted to do this because he was pissed off with the fact that he hasn't literally been able to do anything his entire time in office because he's really mad at the National Assembly and also his own party.
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Legally, you cannot coup me. Yeah, like, I think the semi-serious part of this is that it doesn't make any sense to me how this could have been done if there also wasn't a faction of the Korean military that wanted this, right?
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The Korean military is, I mean, most of Korea's history still to this day, I think it's still a majority of the amount of time South Korea has been in existence, has been under military dictatorships of various kinds. There's been a whole bunch of them. They were... staggeringly hideous. They killed unbelievable numbers of people. They tortured unbelievable numbers of people.
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They were fully backed by the United States. And the military has also always had this real chip on its shoulder about sort of liberal civilian politicians. And they have their version of like all of the conspiracy things that we have about how all Democrats are communists and how they're all like secretly, et cetera, et cetera.
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For this, it's like they're all secretly North Korea supporters, et cetera, et cetera.
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Yeah, this is like military coup and then military coup being overturned by protesters is the single most South Korean thing ever. Right. Like this is just how South Korean history has been. Having the fucking assembly have to break in in the middle of the night to vote. It's so funny.
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We're going to get to the actual details of it in a second, but I want to go back to what was actually in this declaration of martial law. So the Korean constitution does let you declare martial law, but you're only supposed to do it if there's a war going on. If there's an actual crisis happening. Yeah, instead of just like, I'm mad I can't pass my budget, which used to be what was happening here.
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You feel bad on a Monday night and you're like, oh, I guess I'll declare martial law.
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yeah so okay i'm gonna read uh some i'm gonna read a thing about what was going on here about how unhinged this was from hakura who which is a korean media outlet quote commander park on sue announced quote martial law command proclamation number one which by the way that that's how you know you're dealing with people who have done this before when when when they start doing their like decree number one decree number two oh yeah
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Yeah, that's good. That is an experience, the sign of like very, very experienced military coup people announced martial law command proclamation number one based on the contents of prohibiting all political activities of the National Assembly and local assemblies.
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The proclamation also included contents that controlled the press and publications and prohibited citizens assemblies and demonstrations as well as strikes and work stoppages by workers.
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It is also notable that it included the content, quote, all medical personnel, including residents who are on strike, who have left the medical field, must return to their original work within 48 hours and work faithfully and violations will be published in accordance with the Martial Law Act.
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Now, it's important to note here, if the thing you are trying to do is impose martial law on Korea, according to the Constitution, and obviously, if you're in the state where you're imposing martial law, the law has kind of got out the window, but you can't get rid of the National Assembly. That is not a thing that martial law allows you to do.
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In fact, very explicitly in the Korean Constitution, it says that the National Assembly can't be gotten rid of by martial law. So this suggests to me that, yeah, this was something that was also being sort of spearheaded by parts of the Korean military. Because if you're not someone in the army who has their own interest in doing a coup, and someone asks you to just overthrow the parliament...
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which is a thing that they're not allowed to do, you just say no? Which also makes the failure of this and how unbelievably stupidly it was all put together even more baffling, right? Because if we assume that parts of the cliques in the army had to have been involved with this, and we know, and this is something NPR talks about, Yoon is like fucked, right? There's no way he's holding on to power.
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He's screwed. And that will make him the second Korean president in seven years to be ran out by mass protests. And during the last set of politicians who were getting ran out by mass protests, the army actually started drafting procedures for how they were going to do military takeover to knock out the protests. And they never did it.
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But this has been a thing that's been in the background for a long time. And the liberal establishment has been talking about how the right wants to bring back military rule for ages. This is a situation that in some ways is similar to Brazil where the right has always been a sort of like we like military rule kind of thing. But nobody actually seriously thought they would do it until they did.
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And, you know, I'm going to read one more thing before we go to ads here, which is he claimed that the National Assembly was, quote, the mastermind behind the downfall of the country, which, OK, that's pretty normal stuff.
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quote monsters and quote anti-state forces seeking to overthrow the system now again he has just described the national assembly which is the korean parliament as quote anti-state forces seeking to overthrow the system which now gives us the specter of the anarcho-parliament
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Yeah. Not to tie everything back to America, but like... This subversive shit is stuff that you can trace back to the original dictatorship, right? This is a very, very old, long-running thing in Korean politics. Okay. We will get to the coup after, I guess, we get to a faction that didn't back the coup, which is the Korean capitalist class. So here are some ads. Salute to our comrades.
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We are back. Now, I will say it is true that this whole thing folded so quickly that we never really got a chance to see how the Korean capitalist class would have reacted other than the fact that all of the newspapers immediately were like, what the fuck are you doing? So it's also worth noting, if you're trying to do a coup, right, there are four things that you need to do.
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You need to arrest your senior opposition political figures. You need to seize the radio stations. This includes, you know, today, like newspapers, TV stations, podcasts, obviously, you know, streamers. Yeah, yeah. We're a vital part of the media infrastructure that must be controlled.
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Fast. I think Speed would have fucking gone, just gone sicko mode on their special forces guys, given how just like unbelievably their asses got kicked. You know, you have to seize the airports and you have to take the major government buildings, right? So how many of these did this coup manage to do? They did like zero, right? They sort of kind of took most of the National Assembly.
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Yeah, but that lasted, what, like an hour? Yeah, yeah. We'll get to that in a second. So it seems like what we have reporting from the Democratic Party of Korea, they claim that the military attempted to arrest... the head of the National Assembly, the head of the Democratic Party, and then also the head of the PPP, which is People's Power Party, which is Yoon's own party.
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So he tried to have the head of his own party arrested by Korean special forces. And it didn't work because none of them were at their offices?
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And, you know, they did legitimately shut down some news outlets. And that was, you know, that was sort of genuine. I saw reporters, like, fucking, like, fighting with the military in the streets. It was sick. Yeah. Well, and this is why this is such a bad idea, right?
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Like, in the words of a football commentator whose name I'm forgetting right now, but who had the greatest cast line in all of human history. Oh, no. Disaster. What a bad idea. Like, I... Okay. Just from the logistics of this, right, pretty up on the list of countries you don't want to try to hold by military force is South Korea. And there's a lot of reasons for this.
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One, you know, you're dealing with, like, one of the largest industrial bases in the world. The other thing is, like, this is an entire country of protesters. And capitalist protesters. Very scary.
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Well, but like everyone fucking like fucking everyone in this country either like was a protester when they were a fucking kid or was one now to the extent where like liberal members of parliament know how to build barricades. It's so cool. This actually mattered enormously. Like, fucking guys who are just, like, random aides.
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There are videos of this, of, like, just, like, random staffer guys, like, holding barricades from, like, against, like, paratrooper units, and, like, just random staffers, like, shooting fire extinguishers at armed special forces units. Like, can you fucking imagine that shit in the U.S.? Like... It was very cool to see.
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Yeah, and, like, this is why this is such a terrible idea, because everyone has a whole bunch of institutional memory and experience of this, right? Not just because, you know, the Democratic Party, right, which is the party that... This was largely targeted at most of like the elder statesmen of this party used to be Korean student protesters.
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Like they're all veterans of the campaigns that brought down the military government. And it's not just that there's like there's a memory of it. It's like there are protests outside the national assembly like every fucking day. Right. Like, again, the last time they brought down a prime minister with mass protests was seven years ago.
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This is a whole country of people who know how to do this shit. And for some reason, these idiots were like, we have no popular support whatsoever. And we're just going to be able to like roll over this entire country in one night.
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So I think the plan was to hold the National Assembly and prevent the National Assembly from convening so that there was nobody who could override the martial law order.
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Yeah, so the problem here, again, is that you're dealing with an entire country that has been doing this for fucking ages, right? So they do this at like 10.30 at night, and immediately what happens is just like a bunch of drunk guys in bars show up to the National Assembly. The moment I knew it was doomed was I was reading in the New York Times, they had an interview with this guy who showed up.
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This is, again, when I'm talking about this being a country of protesters. These guys aren't leftist revolutionaries, right? One of the guys they were talking to, the New York Times, they're journalists on the ground, pulls over a random guy, And he's a 60 year old real estate agent. Right. This is a guy who should be like this should be the base of a military coup. Right.
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This is a 60 year old man who does real estate. And he heard about this. It immediately his his life was, quote, this is the end. So he drove for a fucking hour at like one in the morning to show up to the National Assembly to go fight the army. There was just no way this is going to work. And so people, even though it's really late at night, people just flood out.
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And suddenly, there's all of these protesters in front of the National Assembly, and they're doing shit like, there's this unbelievable video of this soldier, like, tries to take a guy's phone, and this guy has some kind of martial arts training, and just grabs his arm and just spins him around. It's the coolest thing.
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And the guy's just like, the soldier's like, well, fuck this, I'm not dealing with this shit.
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It's midnight. I should be in bed. What's going on? And part of this too also. And this is a smart decision by someone. Is that these guys weren't issued with actual bullets. So when I say these guys, and this is the actual alarming part about this, is that these were largely Korean paratrooper units.
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And Korean paratrooper units are some of the most unhinged, like, fascist troops in the entire world. Like, these are people who didn't just fight in the Korean War. A bunch of these guys fought in Vietnam. Like, on the American side, they are notorious as the people who the military has always used to sort of put down protests.
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One of the most famous examples of this is the Guangzhou uprising in 1980. This was a pro-democracy uprising after one of the... various stages of insane military coup stuff was going on in South Korea in 1980. And there's a large democratic uprising from sort of students and workers. There's a bunch of strikes. They take this area and the paratroopers come in and shoot them all.
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They killed probably several thousand people. And a lot of the paratrooper units that were deployed to take the National Assembly were literally the same units that were sent in to crush this uprising in 1980. So this was in some ways very, very scary, right?
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Because these are like, again, these are the units that were sent in to shoot a bunch of fucking civilians in the streets in order to keep military rule intact. However, comma, this time these pair of units just got their shit handed to them. So it's sort of unclear exactly what was going on in the National Assembly.
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It seemed like some National Assembly members were still there, but somehow, and we know part of how this happened, which is protesters were just, there's a video of, I think it was like the opposition leader, the protesters like pushed him up over a fence so he could break into the National Assembly and get past the military barricades.
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Like 190 lawmakers somehow like got into the National Assembly and barricaded themselves in. Like,
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You know, we had this with January 6th, right? And, like, what did our congresspeople do with January 6th? They all ran and hid. I mean, these are slightly different circumstances. Yeah, this is true. But, like, you know, okay, so if you look at...
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there's been a lot of shit talking of the, of the American people's willingness to protest and stuff in, in the light of like watching the Korean people overturn this coup in like three hours. And, and I will point out that in 2020, this was, this was literally four years ago. Like we put the president of the United States in a bunker.
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People fought the secret service hand to hand outside the gates of the white house. Like the police in this country lost control of the centers of several major American cities. So like Americans will fight, right? But can you imagine, like, Nancy Pelosi or, like, Chuck Schumer or whoever was around, like, trying to set up... Like, setting up barricades to stop the army from, like, marching in?
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Like, no. It's unreal. And these were good barricades, too. These were very well-constructed barricades. These were barricades that, like... are better than a lot of barricades I've seen set up by protesters over the, like, in the US over the last few years.
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And the consequence of this was that the National Assembly just voted for the coup to be over because they can just vote to say that the martial law is over. And then the military kind of was just like, well, shit, and just kind of left.
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And we are so back. We are so back. It has never been more over for President Yoon. That is true. It has never been more over. So part of the weird part about this is that Yoon just vanishes for most of this. We don't hear from him until the morning when he announces that he's going to roll back the martial law thing, but he needs his cabinet there to do the vote, so he's going to do it later.
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I don't know, but the troops have already all pulled out by this point and like they go back to their barracks after the National Assembly. It's like, what the fuck? So there's been a lot of hay made about how 190 members of the National Assembly showed up and every single one of them voted to end martial law. And like, that's cool.
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But I've seen a lot of people be like, oh, look at how democratic the PPP, which is the right wing party that Yoon's a part of, is from. Like they voted to do it. But like, OK, yes, it was this was a unanimous vote. I need everyone to understand that there were 300 members of the National Assembly. And that means that means 110 of them didn't show up.
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and that of the people who showed up, there were only 18 members of the PPP who showed up to this. Now, and part of that, like, it is true, it was a bit difficult to get through the fucking military occupation with paratroopers, but everyone else seemed to have managed to.
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So, you know, and Yoon's own party also just hates him because, again, like, one of the scandals he's going down for is, like, fucking with their primaries. And like getting a bunch of people who had safe seats, like losing their safe seats so he could put his guys in. And again, he also tried to arrest the head of his own party.
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So like these people don't like him for very immediate personal reasons, not because the PPP is somehow like a party more committed to democracy than the Republican Party is here. Like, no, these people all suck. Like, oh, God. But this leaves us with the aftermath of this. And the first thing I want to kind of go over is what the fuck were they doing?
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Because again, if you look at the sequence of events here, right, there's this coup, right? The martial law goes into effect. The army backs it and tries to occupy the National Assembly, but then the National Assembly votes that the martial law is over and then the army just leaves. Now, What?
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If you go back to remember when I was talking about the beginning of this, right, seizing the National Assembly is not something you are allowed to do in a state of emergency or a martial law imposition. Right. That's something explicitly the army is banned from doing. They did it anyways, which means that like probably like a bunch of generals are also going to prison for this.
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But then they also immediately backed down when it became clear that, you know, there were going to there was going to be resistance and that if they were going to try to stop this, they were either going to have to beat the shit out of or just like actually shoot a bunch of lawmakers in the National Assembly. And I understand that that's a bad idea.
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And I get why these people didn't want to do that, just like from their own thing politically. But if you weren't willing to do that, why did you do this in the first place? Like, how did you think this was going to go? The only thing I could think of is that they thought they could just sort of... They thought it was 10.30 at night. We can just shock and awe everyone. We'll just roll them over.
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Ah, what a world. And also, with Bolivia, too, you know, there's, okay, so A, with Bolivia, there's a lot of debate over whether that coup was real or not. I'd lean towards it was, there's a lot of people who think it was staged, but also, if it wasn't staged, the excuse they have is that the general who was leading it was about to get fired, so he just had to go, right?
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It's like, well, yeah, okay, it looked like a completely half-cocked coup because it was. They just, they had to go before he got fired. This one, there was no time pressure. He could have just done this whenever with better planning. And I don't know, it's it's all it's all very, very deeply weird in terms of what's happening next.
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I mean, Yoon was finished anyways, like he again, he had a 20 percent approval rating going into this coming out of this. There's immediately the Democratic Party is trying to impeach him like a bunch of the PPP, who's, again, supposed to be his party, are also going along with it because they hate him.
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There was some very funny comments from PPP guys who were like his supporters who were like, well, he literally one of them said that he did this thing. Has anyone thought about like the pressure and burden placed on him? Maybe someone should have gone to talk to him. He did this because he was lonely, which is the most insane thing I've ever heard in my life.
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Like he just he just tried to argue that this guy did a coup because he was lonely.
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Yeah, and, like, he is going to get impeached. The only way he's not going to get impeached is if the judiciary steps in to save him, and I can't imagine them trying it after, again, he just tried to do a coup. He's going to prison. Like, probably his defense secretary is going to prison. Like, the defense minister is going to prison. Probably a bunch of military guys are going to prison.
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Like, this is... God, it's so funny. They have just... effectively annihilated their own political power for a generation like this faction of people who have been running the country is just gone I mean they'll still be the PPP right this will be like conservatives but like they just have obliterated themselves in maybe the most spectacular fashion I have ever seen
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you know what happens from there is sort of unclear is that right now uh we're recording this wednesday yeah wednesday at like 10 a.m yeah so it's unclear exactly what's gonna happen in the time between when this when we record this and when this goes out but yoon is finished this is it's pretty jover yeah and i'm i'm hoping that we see a serious attempt to actually like deal with the fact that the army is ran by a bunch of people who tried to do a coup we won't and we might
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Well, no. Here's the thing. In the U.S., absolutely not. South Korea, maybe. There's a chance. There is a slight chance that people get purged from this, right? In a similar way to like Lula kind of purging some of the army.
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I can't imagine they're going to do more because it's South Korea. Well, I will also say one of the things that's happening is Korea's major trade union federation is doing a general strike until the impeachment happens. So, you know, there is a lot of pressure to clean house here.
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And like a lot of Korean liberalism is based on this sort of mythos of like of the student protesters and like the protesters who brought down the military dictatorship and trying to do a military coup and immediately failing is like the best possible thing you could have done for them. Yeah. The consequences of this for Yoon are going to be extremely bad. I hope we get a better Korea out of this.
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I hope this sort of starts to stem the tide of the unhinged right-wing surge that's been happening there for a while now.
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Yeah, I mean, it's... Wow, it went bad. May every single right-wing attempt to do this go this badly, because good lord.
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Yeah, and quite possibly this is going to happen to you too. And I want everyone to understand that in terms of military cues in the last six months, the protesters are 2-0 and the Army is 0-2. So if this happens to you soon, which it very much might, go get them.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast that is quite often about abortion in this country. I'm your host, Mia Wong. Things have been very bad under the last administration and the administration before that and the administration before that. And going back a long, long time, things have been not good. They've been steadily getting worse. And there is a lot of fear.
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And I think a lot of it is very justified that things are going to get even worse under Trump. And to talk about what we need to be afraid of and what we don't. is Kate Bertash, who's the Executive Director of the Digital Defense Fund, and also Crystal, who's an abortion worker and also a volunteer for Abortion Hotlines. So both of you two, welcome to the show.
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Yeah, I'm really excited to talk to you both, and I'm also excited to let Kate talk a little bit about what the Digital Defense Fund is.
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The very first wave impact of this election has been a lot of sort of fear about what's coming. And I wanted to, I guess, ask you about what kinds of fears you've been seeing and maybe talk a little bit about which ones are more justified than others. Because I think there's been some concern that I think is justified and is good.
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And there's also been some stuff that is kind of not rooted in what the threats are.
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Yeah. So we'll get to why in a second. I want to also cover, so there's a 37% tariff on Bangladesh, which is going to be devastating for, I mean, a lot of the textile imports. 25% on South Korea. So fucking rip you ever getting a phone again. 32% on Taiwan. So rip the entire tech industry. Fucking rip Taiwan too. These tariffs are going to devastate the international economy.
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OK, I have been angry about this since the fucking election. People have been calling these tariffs a tax. That is just no. It is not what's happening here. This is like calling it a tax.
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is to completely underplay how serious this is this is not a fucking tax this is the wholesale destruction of entire industries and some of these industries like fast fashion which you know has always been undergirded by the exploitation of workers from China to Bangladesh and also like in the US too but like you know fuck those things whatever they never needed to exist fuck them but like you know like you're probably not gonna be able to fucking buy board games anymore because they're gonna be too expensive to produce
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Yeah. Yeah. It's done. Like the economy as we knew it does not exist as of like this morning. Right. Everything that we've known about how this thing works is fucking done. And some of these are just, you know, like unbelievably hideously cruel. So there's, for example, a 44% tariff on Myanmar. Yeah.
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Which, you know, is a country, yeah, devastated by a horrific war, wage for a brutal dictatorship, and also fucking suffering from a catastrophic earthquake. And we're like, fuck you, eat shit, 44% tariff.
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There's one more that I want to talk about, which is that Sri Lanka has been suffering from an unbelievably devastating series of economic crises, and they're getting hit with a 44% fucking tariff in a moment when they already haven't had enough dollars to fucking import fuel for their economy to function.
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So this is going to be devastating, not just for us, but for a whole bunch of people across the world. So this is the other aspect of this, too, that's really fucking brutal, is that for the U.S., right, we don't need other countries' money. We don't need to have piles of any other country's money around, right? We can just buy things in American dollars.
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But if you are Sri Lanka, you need American dollars to buy oil. Yes. There are so many fucking things that you could only buy in American dollars. And when these tariffs go up, when the prices increase, and when they can't fucking sell their stuff, that means that they don't have dollars. And that means that they can't get access to a whole bunch of the vital commodities that they need to survive.
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And this is just going to fucking devastate them. And I think that's been an angle that I really wanted to make sure we talked about because...
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It's been, I haven't seen any fucking mention of it at all, even though those are the people who are going to suffer the most in this, are people who are already completely on the fucking edge, whose economies have already been collapsed, who've already been so brutally exploited by these same fucking people, and they're just fucked.
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Now, there is a funny part of all of this. There is some fun here. Oh, good. Okay, so one of the big questions about the tariffs was how were they going to calculate the tariffs on all of these countries, right? Because they were saying that their tariffs were going to be a projection of currency manipulation and value-added taxes and all of these subsidies to vital industries.
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And the question, again, was literally how can they possibly calculate the tariff rates of hundreds of different countries and taking into account all of these things, right? Right. Now, the news that had been leaking a couple of weeks ago was that they were going to do brackets. What they actually appear to have done is ask ChatGPT... ChatGPT? Oh, no!
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I want to give a lot of credit to the economist, James Sirarecki, who's the guy who figured out their formula. So their formula, and this is drawing for something. I mean, I saw it from James first, but like, so their formula is literally just, you take a country's trade deficit with the US. And it's also important to note here that they're not counting services.
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right when again if you're if you're missing the products and just getting in services that's half the economy as i understand it yeah yeah that's especially for the u.s which provides an enormous number of services you know but these people are fucking fascists and so they don't they don't think that like services are fucking real right it's it's the same ideology that undergirds the whole thing about like service workers not being fucking real workers literally the only real job is that one video of a guy wrestling with an oil derrick
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And that's the thing though, because their image of the world is the fascist image of the world. And in the fascist image of the world, labor is just masculinity. Yeah. And that's why they're fucking doing it like this. And so the fascists have asked ChatGPT how to do tariffs. And what they got is, again, so they take the country's trade deficit and divide it by their total exports to the US.
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Now, this is nothing. Right? Like, in economic terms... No, that's not how you do anything. This is not a real thing. Like, this is like trying to measure someone's height by, like, dividing their favorite number by the average radius of an apple. Like, it's literally nothing.
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There is no scientific basis, Robert, for measuring height by dividing favorite number by apple radius. We simply must accept the truth of science.
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Mm-hmm. Well, and you can tell the extent to which they were relying on this and didn't calculate themselves because so after it started to spread that this is just how they were doing it, after James Surowiecki calculated it, the White House said, no, no, no, no, no, hold on, no, no, no, that's not right. We use an actual complex formula. And so they released a fake formula.
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But the thing about the formula, right, is that the formula is just, it is literally just trade deficit divided by total exports, but they threw in two random variables as Greek letters. But there's one on the top, there's one on the numerator, one on the denominator, and they're the same, so they cancel each other out. That sounds right to me.
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This is how the economy dies, not through tragedy, but through farce.
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A lot of people are going to die. No, and I mean, like my actual serious line on this is that this is the great double bind of capitalism is that we are all reliant simultaneously. We are reliant for our survival on the same economy that will make us all homeless, right? Is the same economy that we need to fucking eat every single day.
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That even in good times, this economy fucking strips from us the value of the labor we produce and hands us back a bunch of fucking scraps that pay for not enough of anything that we need. So even as our enemies, you know, tear apart the system that exploits us, we are the fucking ones who's going to suffer.
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Neoliberalism finally has, in Trump, produced its own gravedigger, and our fucking job, and the job of every single one of us and every single person listening to this show, is to make sure that we also aren't the ones thrown into this fucking grave. And this is going to require a kind of organizing that is in some ways like, but in some ways unlike anything we've done before.
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We're about to experience a level of... unbelievable economic chaos that we sort of saw during 2020 but during 2020 there was you know as bad as everything got the state stepped in and decided to do welfare reforms right like they gave people a bunch of fucking money and it wasn't enough but they did it now none of that shit we are the only people who are going to be able to keep each other alive
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And that's what we have to be doing right now is we have to be keeping each other alive until we are organized enough and we are powerful enough to fucking run these people out so they can't ever fuck us again like this.
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Oh, God. One last thing we should mention is that like this is already united the entire world against us. Effectively, people, countries who have never worked together before in their entire existence are working together.
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Yeah. And also, you know, and like the thing, the thing, the other thing that we have to do here, and this is this is literally our responsibility on this podcast and also the responsibility of like fucking everyone who is having conversations with another person is that this is entirely Trump's fault. He fucking did this.
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Like, oh, yeah, this is not fucking the EU or whatever the fuck whoever's doing retaliatory.
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The people who put Trump in power didn't want this. This is just him. The actual solution to this is all of us running this fucker out and not us getting drawn into his fucking bullshit wars with Canada or Greenland or whatever the fuck country he decides to invade in the next year or two. Is that all for Tariff Talk? Yeah, that's all we got on the tariffs.
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That's I will say I will say the thing about the Booker one. So if you were writing a parody of the Democratic Party, you would write that Cory Booker did this and like did that, did this filibuster and then immediately turned around and voted yes for a cloture vote to allow Trump to appoint another nominee. And that's exactly what they did. You can't parody them. It's beyond parody.
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And here's the thing about that, right? Like, do you know how many Democrats there are in the Senate? Do you know how many hours you could filibuster them for if you were actually determined to fucking do this? And on how many different things? If we had a rotating series of Democrats.
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Yeah, but they're not. They're not willing to fucking do it.
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And even if you were going to do this as a fucking show vote thing, you could have voted no on the cloture motion to like fucking do the, to like appoint the next nominee. They're just like, no, fuck you.
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Yeah. And every single moment that Trump is in power, the way the way that they fucking just rolled over for him looks worse and worse. He acknowledged it in the speech.
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It's staggering the extent to which they can say a sentence where every single individual word is a lie. Like stunning.
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Can you explain what habeas corpus actually is for the listeners?
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Yeah, yeah. Like that previous one. Then this one just fucking obliterated it.
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Well, I think that's probably an episode. Wait, shit, hold on. I just found the funniest fucking thing about this tariff that I think I've seen yet from fucking VFX. Oh, wait, wait, wait.
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Okay, we're back. Apparently, the tariffs are not broken down by country. This is a quote from this guy, VFX, on Twitter. They're not broken down by country. They're broken down by top-level internet domain. It's why the island is populated entirely by penguins, the .hm domain, and why the Diego Garcia military base are listed.
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Yeah, yeah. And why Reunion and Gibraltar are listed separately from France and the UK?
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Look, look, okay. The note I want to close on is that... So, podcaster Mike Duncan, the creator of the Revolutions podcast, a man who has spent literally tens of thousands of hours writing about every revolution that's ever happened.
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At the end of the original run of the series, Revolutions, he makes this point, which is that all revolutions work because you encounter one of the great idiots of history... A man who is blessed with the inalienable ability to make the wrong decision at every single time.
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And my God, if we can't beat these motherfuckers, that shit's entirely on us because we have been handed one of the greatest idiots of history that has ever existed in the history of humanity. And our fucking job now is to turn that into fucking a better world.
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Welcome to Kidnapping Here, a podcast where I last left RFK Jr. on the proclamation that if he was to take office, millions will die, and all evidence suggests that I am going to be right about this. I am your host, Mia Wong. With me is Gare.
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Really, truly, only the white man could make real unlimited genocide in the first world. It's great. It's great stuff. So this is going to be a recap episode of not even all, like some of the stuff RFK Jr. has done since he's gotten confirmed as the fucking United States' Secretary of Health and Human Services, an organization which includes...
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So many things, but like, for example, the NIH, the CDC, FDA, I believe. Yeah, many, many things. So, okay, there are lots and lots and lots of different rounds of budget cuts that are happening and grant cuts. from a whole bunch of different departments and agencies. We're going to start with National Institutes of Health cutting a whole bunch of studies for vaccines for new diseases.
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So RFK Jr. 's thing was, well, we're not going to fund any COVID research because COVID is over. So no more research into COVID vaccine treatments. We're not going to fund that. Now, obviously, COVID is like not over. Trivially, obviously, you catch it and it makes you sick and sometimes you die and sometimes you get debilitating symptoms. long-term negative health outcomes.
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But this is the logic that they're using to just be like, no, fuck it, fuck it. We'll cut all of the funding that we can find that does this stuff. Now, the problem again, and so these cuts look a lot like the very beginning of the Trump administration where they were just going through and like...
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you'd get a giant list of grants that got cut in the sense that they're like control effing programs, right? And they're like searching for keywords and then just killing all the block grants that do that. We'll get more into this at the end of the episode with like a different set of cuts. But one of the big issues with this is that it's killing coronavirus research in general. Like all of it.
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He's getting like massive cuts. And so this includes, I think it was CNBC or as you're putting on this, killing a bunch of fairly like late stage research on things like, you know, like actually having vaccines that could work across like the broad category of coronaviruses. Because like obviously there are a whole bunch of different kinds of coronaviruses and there are certain sort of.
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vaccine techniques that can work to suppress the families of them and fucking, I don't know, maybe the Europeans or the Chinese will figure out how to do that because it sure as fuck isn't going to be us after we cut all this fucking funding. It's great. So, all right, we're starting sort of, I guess, on the vaccine beat here because there's so many different kinds of bullshit.
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One of the other really big things that happened is Dr. Mark Peters, who was the guy who, like, did Operation Warp Speed, which was Trump's, like, big push to get a COVID vaccine out. And this is something I think is worth highlighting. And again, this guy, like, worked under Trump, right? And some of these programs that we're going to talk about later were Trump programs, right? But Trump won?
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I mean, like, Trump did do some anti-vax shit and say some anti-vax shit, but he wasn't, like, a hardline anti-vaxxer? Definitely not, no.
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Yeah, and I think one of the interesting elements of this is something I talked about more in the immediate wake of 2020, like 2021, 2022, is there used to be a big split in the Republican Party between the lab leakers and the anti-vaxxers.
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Because the thing about being a lab leak person is that, like, you can't be a China released a bioweapon person who also thinks that the vaccine is evil, or at least you shouldn't be able to, that those are, like, mutually... It took years.
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Legitimately, this is enough cognitive dissonance that even, like, the Alex Jones types, it took years for them to sort of, like, develop a level of cognitive dissonance that allowed them to do this. They did do it, eventually, and what we're seeing right now, right, is, like...
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Trump, as a way of sort of shoring up his anti-vaccine flank, has just like handed control over all public health policy to these just like hideous anti-vaccine like cranks. And so Peter Marks, who was like one of the big guys from Trump one and who stayed on through Biden, who was like, yeah, OK, I'm going to fucking get this vaccine to work. He has been forced to resign.
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And Marx also was the guy who was in charge of vaccine safety in the U.S., right? And he's forced out. And he said in a statement for CNN, I mean, you can read the whole thing somewhere. But, quote, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the secretary. This is RFK Jr. But rather, he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies. So that's good.
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That's the guy who used to be in charge of our country's vaccine safety going like, yeah, this guy wanted me to just fucking lie about vaccines constantly. So that's great. That's fun. So before we get into the people who he's bringing in to do his unbelievably fake hack bullshit vaccine study stuff, we should talk a bit about the measles outbreak in Texas.
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Now, the reason that this isn't getting more coverage is that this is going to get... a really significant amount of coverage on this show in the near future. When when those episodes are done, this is going to get significant coverage for now. What I think is sort of important about this is that so there has been an outbreak of measles, which like there should not be outbreaks of measles.
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We have defeated measles. We have the vaccine. You can take it. It's part of the MMR vaccine. You take it and then you don't get measles. But there are massive, you know, like communities who are fucking not vaccinating and And as like in large part because of the fucking anti-vaccine shit that's being spread by people like RFK Jr. And faced with this, RFK Jr.
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has done a bunch of unbelievably mealy mouth bullshit about his personal choice to do vaccines, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then also did a whole thing about how he was going to have the government send vitamin A to like combat measles. which is just nonsense, right? Like, so this is obviously just a complete fucking fiasco. We're going to cover this more as it goes on.
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Yeah, so stay tuned for more measles horrors. Yeah. The other thing we're not going to cover because it's going to be covered by these products and services are these advertisements.
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We are back. Now, what we are not coming closer to is finding a connection between vaccines and autism because there isn't one. It's all fake. However, comma, people who don't believe this include RFK Jr. So RFK Jr. has been...
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doing something okay it's genuinely a little bit unclear who exactly is running this whether this is like like the Department of Health and Human Services is like a broader organization or just the CDC but he's trying to set up a bunch of people to like basically cook the books and try to publish some shit that shows a link between vaccines and autism and
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It's genuinely deeply murky and unclear as to who's doing what right now. But one of the people who's been brought in to do this is David Gere, who is, oh, God, oh, boy. I mean, even by the standards of guy whose job it is to like cook evidence to make it look like there's a connection between vaccines and autism, even by their standards, Gere is like an absolute fucking hack.
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So we talked about Angie Wakefield on this show, and there is weirdly a Wakefield connection here too. So Wakefield's the doctor who originally cooked up a connection between the MMR vaccine and autism. Gear is from a slightly different faction of these cranks.
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This is the faction that's the most closely aligned with RFK Jr., and this is the faction that thinks that weird methylmercury or whatever the fuck in some older vaccines was causing autism, which no, it wasn't. But he, you know, he and his dad, Mark here, like did a whole bunch of work to try to sort of establish this evidence. I'm going to read this from NBC just describing their work.
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Quote, the Gears conducted research from a makeshift laboratory in their in their carpeted wood paneled suburban Maryland basement. So get there. They're doing this shit from their basement. Yeah.
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published several studies, many of which were retracted, and promoted an unproven treatment for autism that cost families tens of thousands of dollars and included injections of Lupron, a drug used for prostate cancer in early puberty. In children, it's only approved for precocious puberty and comes with side effects including bone damage, heart issues, and seizures.
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They diagnosed kids with precocious puberty without proper testing and misled parents into thinking they were signing up for an approved autism therapy. A 2011 Maryland Board of Physicians investigation found the girls had violated standards of care. So, to back up for a second, right? A, they claimed that mercury in vaccines is causing autism.
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B, they claimed to be able to treat it with puberty blockers? Like, they can cure autism with a puberty blocker? Yes. Which is also extremely funny, given, like... All of these people are trying to ban puberty blockers now.
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Unfortunately, this is one of the other problems. This is like... You get a lot of sources that are just fucking making shit up about these fucking diseases.
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Yeah. So again, this guy is like, I found the cure for autism and it's puberty blockers.
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I guess I'll say it like that. Look, I... Being on the right puberty blocker is better for an autistic kid than going through puberty if you are trans. But, come on!
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Pointing out hypocrisy is important because morale is a terrain of struggle. It makes you feel good, and that's... Little bit important average John Stewart post, but okay, let's continue So his father Mark gear who he was doing the bunch of this research wish was short of his medical license now David gear actually amazingly Amazingly was not sure to his medical license and gears.
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Do you want to guess why he wasn't sure to his medical license? He didn't have one Fucking have one So instead, he was prosecuted for doing this shit without a medical license. He also doesn't have a medical degree. He has like a liberal arts degree. Okay, okay.
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He's like the only person I've ever seen who actually genuinely did do dangerous and unauthorized fucking unauthorized medical experiments on children with puberty blockers.
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It's a fucking anti-vaxxer. This is the guy they're bringing in to, like, to cook up a connection between vaccines and autism using, like, fucking Bears data or whatever. So... Investigative journalist Brian Deer, who is, I think, probably most famous to people who've watched an H-Bomber guy video as the guy who brought down disgraced ex-doctor Angie Wakefield. Deer also wrote about this guy.
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Like in his like unbelievably dog shit study about. So he publishes like an unbelievably dog shit study about like the mercury and vaccines causes autism, whatever the fuck. And it gets basically like immediately obliterated the moment autism like activists discover it. And they're like, holy fucking shit. Like these people are evil. I'm going to read a quote from Brian Deer's article about it.
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One of Ms. Siddell's, that's the person who, like, the autism, like, advocate, activist who, like, discovered this stuff. One of her complaints concerning the Greer's apparent institutional review.
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The seven-member IRB institutional review board consists of Mark and Dave Greer, Dr. Greer's wife, two of his business associates, and two mothers of autistic children, one of whom has publicly acknowledged that her son is the... patient-slash-subject of Dr. Gere and the other whom is a plaintiff in three pending vaccine injury claims?
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So the IRB, right, this is this is like an ethical sort of review board thing that you're supposed to go through to get your studies like approved. So the IRB for the study, again, is these two guys, his dad's fucking wife, two of the business associates and the mothers of two autistic children who think that vaccines cause autism and are like one of whom is in a lawsuit about it.
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And the other one is taking the fucking puberty blockers to try to cure the autism. So this is the guy who is being brought in to do the book cooking is a guy with no medical license, no medical degree who had to retract his papers because they were bullshit. Yeah.
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Also, and this is something that's common between him and RFK juniors, all these people, they think that like, and this is going to be relevant when we get to the sort of HIV AIDS. Part of this is that these people think that diseases are caused by malnutrition and not by, you know, like diseases. Yeah. And they think that you can treat them with just being healthy instead of, like, vaccines.
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And, you know, this is their worldview, right? These people are sort of eugenicists. This is also why they, like, one of the reasons why they fucking hate autism so much. is that they're just on a sort of political level. That's just what their ideology is.
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Okay, so let's talk about the last candidate. group of things here, which is another series of massive budget cuts that they're doing. This is another thing where they have a giant list of grants that they're fucking cutting. This is another, like, anti-DEI. And so, you know, there's a lot of the things that I guess you would expect from one of these, like, you can only study white people ones.
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So, like, there are a whole bunch of programs in this list of, like, grants that they're cutting that are, like, studying, you know, racism in medicine and, like, the differing medical outcomes between like people of different races because they're getting different levels of medical care because of the environments that they're in.
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And this is all stuff that like, you know, these people do not want there to be research demonstrating that like racism exists in the medical system because it's just extremely bad for there just to be objective evidence that there is racism and that it's bad and that it kills people.
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So another very bleak thing that I haven't seen much coverage of is that a lot of these grants were funding research into trans healthcare and also the effects of like violence against trans people and things like mental health. There's, you know, and this is also something that's devastating because like...
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Like the state of trans medicine, it's like we know things that are safe and we know things that work, which is just letting people transition. But also there's so much more stuff that we need in terms of like hormone regimes that like work better. Right. And things like that. And also like, you know, I'm just sort of like basic health outcome stuff.
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And yeah, these people do not want anyone to know exactly how bad that their fucking transphobia is affecting the people that they're inflicting it on. And so, yeah, they're like, fuck it, we'll just get rid of all these people's funding. There's also a whole bunch of stuff that has to do with COVID.
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I'm just going to read the description of one of the fucking grants they cut to give you a sense of, like, the shit that they're cutting. Development of a handheld rapid air sensing system to monitor and quantify SARS-CoV-2 and aerosols in real time, which actually would be an unbelievably useful thing, right? Like, a system that could detect...
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fucking COVID aerosols in real time and tell you that there's fucking COVID in the air? Staggeringly useful. They don't fucking want it. One of the big things that they cut is like, you know, we're talking about this with sort of like cutting programs that study structural racism in medicine. They basically went on a county-by-county basis and found every single grant
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State by state, county by county, city by city, every single grant that talks about studying the effects of COVID on non-white people. And they're doing this. I think people have forgotten about this, but one of the things that RFK Jr. said, I think it was during the campaign, was he had this giant rant about how COVID was specifically targeted to leave Chinese people and Jews alive. Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean, you know, so they're just trying to destroy all this stuff. They've also just like in blocks, just like got rid of every single fucking thing that was funding like any program that was like mental health care. As a block thing, they're just cutting all of it. So that's going to make everyone even more normal than we already fucking are.
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One of the other ones that's unbelievably concerning is, again, like, county by county going through and cutting funding for, like, things that promote child vaccination.
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They are systemically trying to cut off kids from getting vaccines, and they're trying to get rid of anything that opposes, like, their efforts to try to convince everyone, like, all parents to fucking not have their kids get vaccines. They also cut a whole bunch of grants for rapid disease response, which is great.
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We'll get to the exact reason why that's so fucking terrifying in a second in the very, very immediate term. They also have killed 145 grants for HIV, and this is a whole bunch of different HIV programs. They are killing funding for distributing and getting people to use PrEP, which is a pill that massively helps prevent HIV infections.
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Especially if you are a trans woman and you are having sex, you should get on PrEP. Or a twink, I will say. Thank you. Yeah, the uptake rates for trans women are specifically lower, which is the thing that we know because we have these fucking funding. And we're not going to have that shit anymore because they're cutting all the fucking funding for these fucking research programs.
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Like your co-host who permanently has only ever come out of lesbian culture.
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Yeah, well, it's ingrained in a lot of places, but there's places where it isn't. And those places are where things go very, very bad very quickly, which is why, obviously, they're eliminating the fucking research for this, because they want to fucking kill queer people. Like, they think that HIV is a fucking lifestyle choice. RFK Jr. in particular thinks it's because of poppers.
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So it's really fucking bleak. I mean, they've cut, you know, they're trying to just fucking get rid of this because these people are just fucking unhinged virulent homophobes and transphobes. And yeah, they want to fucking cut these programs because they think it'll hurt us. They've also laid off the entire Office of Infectious Diseases and HIV AIDS Policy staff. Is that bad? Oh, it's bad.
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Here's CBS. Yeah, so they do child... They're one of the other groups that does childhood vaccination efforts. They also run the fucking national vaccine program, which nobody knows what's going to happen to it now because, again, the thing that was supposed to run it is just fucking gone. So who the fuck knows what's happening with that now?
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They are probably going to just completely destroy Trump's, like, giant... Trump actually, in his first term, had a giant program to, like, end HIV that, like, kind of did stuff because it was someone else's program that Trump just kind of implemented. Oh my god.
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getting so close to the hiv vaccine yeah yeah and you know and so who fucking knows it's probably just completely fucked yeah this is going to have just unbelievably hideous consequences on millions and millions of people and they that's not even that they don't give a shit is that they think it's cool and funny and based when people like us fucking die
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Now, on the other hand, the rest of the US population is about to run into the same fucking thing that all of these stupid ass bankers thought, which is that, oh, Trump will just fuck with the queers and leave us alone.
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No, we're going to close in the same place that I closed the last time I talked about fucking RFK Jr., which is the fucking bird flu, which is that he wants the solution to the bird flu is he wants to fucking let it rip. And he just wants to just like be like, oh, we can just like take the birds and survive the bird flu. And we'll just let the we'll just let it spread and just use those ones.
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And those ones will be healthy. Now, so the thing about this bird flu, right, is that it kills within three to four days. Immunologist Matt Cosey in Scientific America describes how this thing, again, within three to four days has a 90 to 100% kill rate. So, you know, you can't just do this, right? Because it just fucking kills all the birds.
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He doesn't want to fucking vaccinate the birds, which is the thing that, like, if you want to stop this fucking pandemic from spreading, you need to do it, right? And, once again, I need to emphasize enough that when I talked to virologists about this, they said that letting the bird flu rip through all the fucking bird populations, right?
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Just letting it fucking spread, letting it kill everything until you only have the ones that, like, didn't die, is, if you were, like, trying to cook up conditions... like field conditions specifically to try to get it to develop a mutation to spread to humans, this is what you would do? is you would just let it fucking spread uncontrolled and kill everything.
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So this is what we're doing at the same time as, again, anti-vaxxers are fucking running our fucking vaccine services, as we are cutting the staff, cutting grant funding for people who do rapid response to emerging diseases, as we are cutting the fucking entire policy staff for the Office of Infectious Diseases. They are building a fucking pandemic. Yeah.
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And all of these fucking people think that COVID was fucking cooked up in a lab, and what they are doing is, like, they are now doing the thing they are accusing everyone else of doing, which is they are fucking attempting to implement a policy to cook up a fucking plague in a lab.
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Except it's not going to be in a lab, it's going to be in America's fucking factory farms, and we are all going to suffer the consequences of it.
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Like, there are a lot of rifts in the Trump coalition. RFK Jr. and his people cannot fucking be allowed to run these institutions. They need to be fucking run out now. If we do not do this now, millions of people are going to die. I have been saying this.
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I am going to continue to say this because you can see in real time all of the things that are going to lead to all of these people fucking dying. And, you know, his position is not incredibly secure in this coalition, right? Like, yeah, there are lots of sectors of capital who don't want the entire fucking population of the United States to die in a plague.
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So, yeah, go fucking... I don't know. I don't know exactly which public official you pressure or who you go scream at to try to get rid of this guy before he fucking gets us all killed, but go do that. I don't know. Go harass your, like, legislator or whatever or, like, find the nearest person who can be yelled at who will convey this.
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And on that note, getting us yet another fucking one of those... Actually, do they even do the misinformation labels anymore? Unlike Spotify and shit and like YouTube? Oh, of course not. Oh, God.
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Not we. So, all right. Yeah, this is the spitting could happen here. Get this guy out of office before we all fucking die in a plague. Again.
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Someone here has to be vaguely responsible and say, don't fucking do that. Do none of those things. Zero. Zero of those things.
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Let us talk tariffs. Power, sections of the left have long argued, is in logistics. It was logistics that allowed the capitalists of the 1970s and 80s to crush the labor movement by enacting the so-called spatial fix to the crisis of capitalism.
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By shifting production from countries where workers' movements were strong to countries where violence against workers was easier and workers were thus poorer and more exploited, CEOs could pit workers against each other in an endless race to the bottom.
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These practices became known as offshoring, infused with the international attack on unions and the power of workers heralded in the US by Reagan. Together, they crushed the workers' movement and implemented neoliberal austerity throughout the globe through a regime that is colloquially known as free trade. Now, there was, of course, resistance to this.
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maybe most famously the uprising of the Zapatistas in Chiapas in 1994, on the day that NAFTA went into effect. But for all of the victories and all of the spaces that were carved out, it is still the CEOs, the bosses, and the capitalists who rule the world. However, in the wake of their defeat...
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Sections of the working class came to see their own power as a product of the nation, of masculinity, of American jobs for American workers. In this view, you didn't need to form a union. You didn't need to organize. You didn't need to fight the bosses who exploit you.
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All you needed to do for the high-paying blue-collar jobs of the 1960s to return was getting rid of the immigrants and bring jobs back home. This American nationalist ideology was extremely useful to the ruling class.
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It allowed them to turn the rhetoric of the old base of the workers' movement into a fascist movement, which they could then use to smash any genuine workers' struggle and then ride to power to impose more brutal austerity and more pro-capitalist reforms to, in their view, make it impossible for their power ever to be challenged again. But a strange thing happened.
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In the nationalism bred by the defeat of the workers' movement, the human personifications of the capitalist bubble economy in Donald Trump and Elon Musk have come to see their own victory as defeat. They became convinced that the trade deficits, which from a capitalist perspective simply do not matter as long as companies are making money... Sorry. Yes, they know better for shit.
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Not anymore, buddy. Nope. Because these people, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, and the cadre of weird white nationalist fanatics that surround them, have absolutely convinced themselves that if you have a trade deficit, you are being ripped off by foreigners. Yep. Yep.
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And so they concluded that we needed to put tariffs on fucking all of the rest of the world in order to bring American jobs back to Americans. A new national autarky for a fascist world.
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Now, the ruling class, all the capitalists, all these fucking goddamn Goldman Sachs motherfuckers, financial analysts, all of these CNBC dipshits, all of these motherfuckers at BlackRock and all of the global hedge funds, and all of these motherfuckers, all of the tech dipshits, all of the people who backed Trump to a hilt, simply assumed that none of these tariffs would ever happen, that it was all campaign bluster, that he was lying out of his ass, and, you know, Obama, again, I've said this before, ran on abolishing NAFTA.
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So there was, you know, and what the fuck ever came from that, right? We, of course, fucking tried to tell them otherwise. We tried to tell them that they could not fucking control the fascist beast, that one day it would rise to consume them all along with us. They didn't care. They backed Trump anyways because they thought they would get fucking tax breaks. And now, Liberation Day is here.
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Yeah. All of these motherfuckers, they really thought that Trump was going to fucking, that literally all Trump was going to do was punish the transgenders, get rid of woke, and give them tax cuts. Mm-hmm. Yep. And now the tariff walls have gone up. The old world is dead. The new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.
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Chinese real estate, absolutely where you want to be right now, both in Chinatown and in actual China. You put all your money into Chinese real estate. The bubble can't pop a second time. It can only go back up.
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I'm sorry, wait, did you just say Michael Jackson? No, Jordan. Didn't I say Jordan?
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Yeah, let's get to the tariffs. Terrible. Tariffable. Tariffable. That's right, Garrison. Nope. Yeah, so, okay. Let me just read off some of the ones that are going to fuck everyone. Great. 54% tariff on all goods from China. This is a 34% tariff that is being added on to the 20% tariff that was already on. There is a 20% tariff on all goods from the EU.
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46% on Vietnam, which is fucking devastating because it's a huge amount of capital from China. Also, speaking of the China panic...
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our strongest geopolitical ally in the region in terms of having a military right yeah a country that we've been discussing going to war for quite recently yeah like we we just we we have literally and this is this is the funny thing about all of these vicky ostawa pointed this out the more closely allied with the u.s the more fucked you got by these it's such a weird move yeah yeah
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The point of Andorra, the point of Star Wars, is that also you could out-organize them and beat them. Mm-hmm. message of hope.
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running a series of bubble economies, so the tech bubble, the housing bubble, et cetera, et cetera, and it is based on the U.S. dollar and the bond as, like, the fundamental aspects of the, like, as the world reserve currency, the fundamental thing that drives the system.
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And when we come back, we will talk about this literally all exploding and what it's going to do for all of you, which is not good. Yay. Okay, we are back. Now...
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One of the things that have, in a lot of ways, locked the system in place was that because of the way that these manufacturing networks are set up, because they're all so interlinked, because they're all dependent on exploiting differences between production capacity and labor costs in different countries,
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They are all so interconnected that if you try to pull one thread out of it and do a major change to the system, the entire thing is at risk immediately. And this meant that there has always been an enormous structural incentive to keep things the way they were, even if everyone can also already realize that they're kind of fucked up.
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And this dates all the way back to, like, things that most people largely have forgotten about. But, like, Obama, for example, ran on renegotiating NAFTA. And he never, like, intended to do that. But, like, even if he had, the moment he got into power, you know, like, Trump renegotiates NAFTA, too, right? But he renegotiates NAFTA, and it's just, like, the same trade deal.
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Because for a long time, right, if you were going to run the capitalist economy in a functional way, the only thing you could possibly do was run it the way it had already been set up because there were so many structural factors about how the system of production works that this is the only way you could run it and still, like, have the economy not explode.
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But now, we have finally produced a group of men so stupid that they are unconstrained by the structural limits of the economy. And this is where we get into the LeBron of turf tariffs that we're on right now. And we get into something that is very important to understand about this, which is that this shit is not about economics. Right.
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In a sense that you or I will understand that this is none of this stuff is about like we want the economy to grow. It's this is not something that like. really any of the major sectors of capital want because it is just nuking this whole thing and this is why you've seen a split between even Elon Musk has like openly criticized the trade policy even if he's been sort of hedging it
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What we've been seeing is this widening rift, and we talked about this in the last Executive Disorder, where, like, different factions of the Trump administration were literally trying to, like, isolate Trump from, like, Navarro, who's the guy who wants to do all of the tariff bullshit.
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I mean, I think the worrying one to me is that they're very explicitly talking about using military national security assets like in the U.S. against Americans. The thing right now we're doing is like to prevent crime. But like I think very obviously everyone is like that this is immediately gone.
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Like part of this obviously is about like trying to defeat any attempt to even moderately reform the police. But a lot of it is also like, yeah, they're expecting giant protests this summer.
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And they want to be able to use military assets here. And what they're doing with this, the Secretary of Defense is developing a plan to use military assets, presumably against protesters, either that or, you know what I mean, like specific thing here is like used to prevent crime, which is just like the deployment of the U.S. military against like us. Right.
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They've been, you know, literally trying to get him alone in a room so that they can implement their trade policy. But the actual underlying urge here is completely ideological, right? It is this idea that, like... If you run a trade deficit with a country, or if you are buying things from a country, they are ripping you off, and you always need to be selling more things than you're buying?
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That's, I think, a pretty cut and dry. They are developing the apparatus through which they are going to attempt to deploy the army against U.S. citizens in the U.S.
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Yeah, so it's more like CPD black site shit, like Nazi gang shit, like, you know, they're just like shooting people. Yeah, like that's the kind of shit, the torture.
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Which is just, like... So, okay, on one level, like, this is just so fucking nonsense that, like, attempting to explain why it's bullshit is kind of pointless. But we're gonna do it anyways, because someone fucking has to, somewhere. And this actually does also reveal something about the way that money has always worked under these systems.
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Okay, so before we get to what this is going to do to the entire world economy, we need to talk about... Garrison, do you know what balance of payments is? That sounds like something I would ask my accountant about. Yeah, so this is technically an accounting thing, right? But the balance of payments of a country, it is like a leisure thing, right? But it's the measure of their accounts, right?
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You know, there is actually one Democrat who we can verifiably claim did a bunch of weird fundraising shit and did straw donations from foreign donors, and it is Eric Adams, who is Trump's favorite Democrat.
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Trump is personally keeping out of prison. Oh, God.
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In terms of all of the money coming out of the country and all of the money coming into the country. That's like trade balance stuff, right? Yeah. And the balance of payments is actually very important for a lot of countries because specifically most countries in the world need to buy things in a currency they can't print.
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All right. What's what's actually happening with with the turf tariffs? I'm going to I'm just going to start by reading Trump's incredible cope about why everything's going to shit. This is Trump. This is a truth from true social. This is Biden's stock market, not Trump. I didn't take over until January 20th. Terrorists will start kicking in.
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We're soon start kicking in and companies are starting to move to the U.S. in record numbers. Our country will boom, but we have to get rid of the Biden quote overhang. This will take a while. Has nothing to do with the tariffs. All caps. Only that he left us with bad numbers. But when the boom begins, it will be like no other. Be patient. This is Biden's stock market. Yeah.
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So the reason he's saying this is that so today we got a report that the U.S. for the first quarter suffered the first like actual economic contraction of the economy since like 2022. And that basically there was like one quarter in 2022 were contracted and then it like basically since like the lockdowns. It's been expanding. We are probably already in the recession.
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And the other thing that's very important to note here, right, is you're seeing a lot of reporting about this being a contraction. And a lot of the reporting will talk about how, like, yeah, this is because people are, like, rushing to do all their imports right now before the tariffs hit. The thing is, right...
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This economic contraction is like before the actual substantive impact of the tariffs hit. So this is just the beginning of like the rolling economic collapse that all of these tariff tariffs are going to generate. There's been a little bit of movement in the sense that like, okay, so when I last talked about sort of the declines in like shipping tariffs, From China or just shipping in general.
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It was mostly like sort of... I don't know what you'd call them. Shipping industry trade press. This has hit like the mainstream press now that, you know, some of these indicators are showing 60% import drops from China. And it looks like China is maybe kind of starting the preliminary things to figure out how...
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to figure out negotiations and that they've been, the Chinese government has been going behind the scenes and talking to a bunch of like high profile American companies and has been like quietly repealing some of their 125% retaliatory tariffs on the U.S. on like very specific goods. We'll see what happens there. There hasn't been more movement than that.
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And this has always been the structural limit of things like modern monetary theory, which talks about how like your country's ability to like have things isn't constrained by just like the pure money supply of your country as long as you're buying things in your own currency, right? Like the purpose of money is the thing that move assets around, right?
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What is also very interesting is that, so, okay, so like obviously like a bunch of like prices are just increasing already in places like Temu and like Xi'an. And Amazon was going to have like a counter that showed how much additional money you were spending because of the tariffs. And they announced they were going to do this.
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And then President Trump like got on the phone with Jeff Bezos and yelled at him. And then Jeff Bezos said he wasn't going to do it. But this is also an interesting thing because we're actually starting to see cracks between Trump and people like Bezos, the tech people who really have been his closest base of support for this entire project in terms of large-scale sectors of capital.
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It's been these people who have been backing him. And I think as the stuff continues, we're going to continue to see rifts between them and the Trump administration over shit like this because... You know, like, people get really, really... It's something we've talked about a lot in episodes we've done on pricing and inflation is that people get really pissed off when prices go up.
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And that's a way to, like, you know, this is a problem for these companies because this is a way you lose sort of brand loyalty. And that's, like, how everything goes to shit. And Trump has to... is doing all these deflections to be like, it's not actually the tariffs that are doing this because people are going to be really pissed about this and... Yeah, I don't know.
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Welcome, welcome to quarter one of the recession. This is going to be the best quarter of the economy for a long time.
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but inflation isn't a product i mean like yeah okay if you just like hammer the fucking printer button right like yeah you can cause hyperinflation but substantively because because money is something that is a production of the government because it is literally government debt right it's not a commodity in the conventional sense where you have to like figure out how much of it there is and there's like a limited supply of it and you have to like manage limited supply to make sure the economy doesn't explode you can just use the money that you have and you can use debt like deficit spending effectively
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to continue to circulate goods around the economy the problem is if you have to buy something that is not in your currency that's where you need trade because you need to find a way so you know i'm going to take an example that we're going to come back to later which is bolivia right if you are bolivia you need to get american dollars you can buy like gas right so people can like fucking fuel their cars
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And the problem is you can only buy oil in American dollars. So you have to find something to export to a place where you can get American dollars for it. And in this sense, balance of payments actually matters enormously, right? And balance of payments is also just like a function of all of your trade deficits and all of your trade surpluses sort of combined, right? But think about the US.
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This is a notable thing. Everyone uses the dollar to buy shit. There's like nothing that you can't buy with the dollar, right? So, for the United States, none of this shit matters. At all. None of the balanced payment stuff. It is completely irrelevant. Like, literally, completely, totally, and utterly irrelevant. Right?
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Now, if you are, like, Bolivia, and you run out of dollars, then what you have is a spiraling economic crisis where, like, people fucking suddenly can't buy food because no one can buy oil, so no one can move things around, so, like, the entire economy literally collapses. This is a very, very, very common mode of economic collapse. But...
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You know, none of the things that the right is talking about, like in terms of like, oh, you have like the United States has like a trade deficit with China. It's like, yeah, great. That means that we're buying things from them. Like the one good Rand Paul quote ever was like, yes, I have a trade deficit with my grocery store. And that's fine.
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Yeah, I know. But the thing is, it is very, very funny that Rand Paul is now complaining about this because it's like, well, yeah, I don't know. If all of you motherfuckers hadn't spent all this time like fucking palling around with like Alex Jones and the Klan, like we probably wouldn't be here right now. So this is your fault.
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Yeah, like that's the thing. This is all of your fucking fault. Lock them up quick. Zero to ten. Zero to ten. Get them out. Get them out. Get them out. Now, do you know what else we need to get out? Get out of stock. Oh. It's these products and services.
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Get them out of stock. Get them out of stock while you still can. While we still have an economy. We are back. Now, again, as I was saying, like this attempt to make the American economy function in a way that it has trade surpluses with every other country. And also and this is also important. These people don't think that like services are real. And a lot of what the U.S. exports is services.
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But because they're all these really weird like because they're all fascists. Right. They all have all of this weird ideological shit about masculinity and about the favoring of the concrete over the abstract, because the concrete is, like, masculine. It is the nation, right? Like, steel workers and people who fucking hammer coal out.
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Like, this is what masculinity is, this is what nationalism is, this is what men are supposed to do.
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A long time ago, I did a bunch of episodes called Class and the Culture War. And one of the points that I make of that episode is that one of the arguments that the Canadian Jewish Marxist historian Moish Pistone makes about what the Holocaust was. was this attempt to pit the concrete part of capital against the abstract part of capital, right?
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Where the concrete part of capital is like the nation and the worker and the factory and like the boss, right? And all of these concrete things were pitted against the quote-unquote abstract part of capital, which is to say like quote-unquote Jewish financiers
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And all of the sort of, like, weird collection of, like, modifiers that gets associated with, like, you know, the rootless cosmopolitanism, like, the globalism, like, all of this shit, right? And what the Nazis did was embody all of that stuff into just a figure of the Jewish person.
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And his argument, and this is arguing about, like, sort of structural anti-Semitism and what the Holocaust was, was that, like, that was what the Nazi revolution was. That's what the liquidation of, like, and this is how Pessoa describes, like, liquidation of the Jews.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where the ancient leftist adage there is power in logistics has finally been realized by one Donald Trump. I am your host, Mia Wong, and with me is Gare. How are you doing, Gare? Just another great day in America. It's great. It's great. They're arresting judges.
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This is what the Holocaust, this is what the genocide was, was their attempt to destroy the, like, abstract part of this thing by pitting it against the concrete part of this thing. And this is what these fucking people are also doing in their own way, right? Like... Yeah, they're just doing it with, like, the price of eggs or, like, the availability of housing. Yeah, right.
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And, you know, and it's also, like, these people are, like, unhinged anti-Semitic, right? Because this is all part of the same ideology. They just sort of, like, they're doing this shit in different ways and they haven't, like... Yeah, I don't know. Like if these people are in power for like a decade, we might just get this right where they're literally doing the Holocaust again.
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But like we're not at that point yet. But we're at the point is where like this this kind of like under like this kind of fascist understanding of the nation and masculinity and like the concrete versus the abstract and like these figures can be like embodied in history. This is also what the administration is doing with immigrants, right?
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It's like casting them in that role of like the abstract, like the foreigner, the national, like the anti-national.
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Yeah. And this is causing an interesting split because Trump's like political coalition, right, has a bunch of kind of different kinds of fascists in a lot of ways. We're like Trump and Navarro.
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And like, I mean, Trump is instinctually pro-tariff and like he can be talked out of it because, again, this guy's brain, like we saw this in the last administration, like the last person in the room with him can convince him of basically anything. But, you know, those people are structurally committed to, like, this specific version of masculinity.
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And there's a lot of portions of the right that are and that are committed to, like, this trade policy as, like, the America first, American nationalist thing. But, like, someone like Elon Musk isn't that committed to this? And, like, even a lot of the people who are, like, the inner circle sort of, like, Yarvin, like, tech fascist, right? Are like, okay, but hold on.
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Like, we make all of our shit in China. So, like... You know, and this is why, like, Elon is coming against the terrorists because, like, yeah, they're going to fuck him, like, because he has to import stuff and export stuff from China because that's where a bunch of his production facilities are, right?
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And, you know, and once you get out of the circle of, like, that kind of, like, tech fascist, right, and the tech people are the people who are the most closely aligned with this administration, right? Like, in terms of, like, all the sectors of capital, tech is the most closely aligned one. But, you know, you can get out into, like, places like fucking Walgreens and Walmart, right?
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And these are also, like, the Waltons, as a family, are, like, traditional backers of the right for ages and ages and ages, right? They've been backers of far-right causes. They also don't want this because also their entire supply chains work through fucking China and work through moving a bunch of, like, commodities around.
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And the further out you go, when you start getting into, like, actual finance capital, these people are fucking terrified because they're looking at this and, like, holy shit, we're about to lose all of our goddamn money.
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And the consequence of this is that all of this stuff is shaping out in a sort of political battle in the administration over who can get Trump in the room last to try to figure out how the economy is going to work. But
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The problem is, and I have been vindicated in this in the very brief amount of time between when the episode on Friday came out and when we're recording this, there are no negotiations with China. Like, they haven't started. There's no process for starting them.
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It's like, no, there's no negotiations. Yeah. And again, structurally, there can't be negotiations because there's no actual way for the U.S. to not have a trade deficit with China. There's no way you can do that. And that's the thing that'll satisfy these people. So all of this means that the economy is fucking dead. Right.
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This is the sort of like free trade economy we've all grown up in that functions off of like, you know, like fucking drop shipping and all this cheap production, a bunch of other countries and, you know, like assemblies of a bunch of different like goods in different places. And the U.S. is like the economic center of the world is just fucking gone.
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Now, one of the reasons I started writing this episode in the first place. is that I have read so much fucking analyses of these goddamn turf tariffs, and do you know how many of them, for a single fucking second, considered what this was going to be like for anyone who doesn't live in the United States? What the fuck is wrong with people?
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Why does nobody fucking care about a single goddamn person who lives outside the United States? I have read so many fucking analyses of this fucking shit. I have read these things from the business papers. I have read these things from fascists. I have read these things from the center left. I have read these things from leftists.
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Do you know how many of these things have said anything about actual fucking people who do not live in the goddamn United States? Fucking none of them. Every once in a while, you'll get like, this will be bad for the economy of China. This is... This is... A catastrophe!
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Because the people who are going to be most affected by this... When... When the fucking turf tariffs from Liberation Day come back into effect over the summer... Are the working class of Sri Lanka! This is going to be the fucking apocalypse! For a bunch of people... who have been going through hell for years and years and years and years.
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It's going to be places like fucking Bolivia, which is already facing a dollar crisis and is struggling to import fuel. It is going to be places like Bangladesh.
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It is going to be places like Vietnam, which is, you know, structurally in a better position than a lot of the rest of these countries, but like fucking won't be in a structurally better, like that much of a structurally better position when it has like 90% goddamn tariffs on it. And yes, the U.S. is going to be real fucking bad, right? Everything is going to cost a lot more money.
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Yeah, I mean, this is a carceral solution to this, Garrison. Like, we kind of have to be using carceralism to solve the problems of the carceral system. Sure. Speaking of carceral systems, there is the economy that we're all living under. which is also quite literally a carceral system because so much of it is based on prison and slave labor and various kinds across the world.
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All of us are going to have a lot less jobs. People who are in jobs are going to make a lot less money. There is going to be a lot of people fucking homeless. There is going to be a lot of people who can't get fucking food. It is going to be a catastrophe. And also, at the same time, the U.S. is going to look like fucking fully automated luxury gay space communism compared to fucking Sri Lanka.
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This kind of sort of rote American nationalism that has consumed the brains of basically this entire goddamn country on a level so deep Americans don't even fucking think about it, like, is the reason why we fucking have all of this bullshit in the first place.
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And this is why, like, in, like, four fucking months, literally no one in the entire country's social security is actually going to show up because a 19-year-old grouper doesn't understand SQL because nobody in this fucking country gives a single shit about anyone who lives outside of the country enough to try to do a single goddamn word of analysis about how this is going to affect everyone.
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Because the death of the global economy will be felt here. It is going to be felt so much fucking worse everywhere else on goddamn earth. And I am like, I am losing my fucking mind at the extent to which everyone is just fucking refusing to engage with this completely. This has been me being unbelievably fucking angry because, like, I don't know.
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A bunch of my family doesn't live in this country, which means I have to deal with the fact that, like, everyone else who lives in another country is a human being who's exactly the same as fucking we are. And this is a thing that nobody else appears to want to fucking deal with. I am losing my shit.
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Please, God, stop talking about the tariffs as if they only affect the United States and aren't mostly going to be borne by everyone else. Ugh.
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I didn't write a transition for this, but I will transition out of this by, again, going back to the fact that the reason this is going to be so bad is that the global economy is based on a combination of resource extraction and a combination of logistical supply lines that all rely on there not being 100% tariffs on goods imported to the U.S.,
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And when this shit goes through and when the rest of the tariffs go through and make it, you know, the thing that's happening right now is an attempt to avoid this stuff is everyone, you know, and there's something like Nintendo has been talking about, right? Where they were like, okay, our plan to avoid the tariffs on China is to move a bunch of our production into Vietnam.
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And that was happening anyways before the tariffs because of sort of rising labor costs in China and, you know, a whole bunch of sort of factors like that. But none of that shit, none of that stuff that like to sort of like keep the current global economy on a lifeline is going to be able to function once the tariffs on basically every country on earth go into effect.
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And there's a second problem here, which is that, okay, so what is the new economy going to look like? These people, the people running the administration, people like Navarro and people like Trump and a lot of the right who is driving the policy thing here think that the production that's happening everywhere else in the world will just be replaced by the U.S.,
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And there was a trap that people fall into with Chinese economics. And I do this too sometimes because it's, you know, it's a fast and easy way to think about the Chinese economy. And it's not accurate. Well, it's not like, it doesn't capture the full picture of what's going on.
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But the way that people think about the Chinese economy tends to be that the reason that things are made in China is because labor is cheap there. Because either, because of the culmination of exploitation and poverty. And that's true to an extent, right? But the actual sort of genius from capital's perspective of capital's return to China was that
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Now, I have good news and I have bad news about this. I don't remember what the good news was.
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You know, from a capitalist perspective, the Chinese workforce, and this continues to be true 30 or 40 years into the transition, is highly educated and highly skilled. And the education was paid for not by capitalism, right? It was paid for by the sort of socialist system.
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Like, this combination of things, of a highly educated and an increasingly highly skilled as they've been, you know, working these jobs, means that there is an extremely high-skill migrant labor population, right? That knows how to do a bunch of shit like circuit board assembly and like stuff with like chip assembly, right? That is vital to making electronics. And the U.S.
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So we're only getting the bad news, which is that, well, the good news and the bad news is that the system that we all grew up on, the economic system that has, you know, supported us our entire lives or not supported us for our entire lives, the thing, you know, the system that encompasses everything we have ever known is fucking dead. It is dead as shit.
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does not have a couple of hundred thousand migrant workers that you can just have and like exploit and not pay healthcare costs to. You know how all of the chip manufacturing shit works, right? There are people in the U.S. who know how to do some of these kinds of things. But we're talking, you know, even though the U.S.
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does have a manufacturing economy and it is very high tech, it is not on the scale of these things, right?
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And the second big reason why things are produced in China, and this is the reason why production didn't all shift out of China after 2011, when there were huge protests there and huge riots there over labor conditions, is that there was an unbelievable amount of capital outlet, this physical factory infrastructure that is in China that you can't easily just move out to another country.
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And this is the basic things like the power grid functions. Right? And you can't really easily replicate that, and you can't just have this thing that all these people want to do, where, like, the U.S. will just suddenly, you know, have all of these factories, right?
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And suddenly, like, all these things will just, like, come back, and miraculously, like, there will be all of these jobs, because, like, who the fuck is going... Like, we don't... We literally... We don't have the technology for this. Well, not so much technology, but it's like... Who is going to build all of the factories, right? Like, the factories don't exist here.
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The interlinked technical systems for them just don't exist here.
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Yeah, iPhone, iPhone, 20 years. Yeah, but like, you know, and like a lot of this is because, and like, you know, you're hearing a lot of reports now of like small business owners who are talking about like, yeah, it's so much easier to work with Chinese manufacturers. It's, like, impossible to work with American manufacturers. And part of that is just exploitation, right?
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Like, yeah, there's a lot of things that, like, there were, like, labor conditions that are very common in China that do happen in the U.S. but are much easier to do there. But also, like, I don't know, like, China has, like, an entire network of, like,
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The ability to basically do this sort of, like, pop-up light and medium manufacturing that can, like, retool itself really quickly in the US doesn't fucking have that, right? Like, we do have a bunch of manufacturing in the US, right? Like, that is the thing that we have.
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But it was largely pushed into, like, the suburbs to get rid of sort of, like, the masses of workers that arose in cities like Detroit to, like, atomize them, right? And this is actually, like, also happening in China right now, weirdly.
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Like, China has been pivoting to a service economy for a long time, but the thing is, the service economy, a lot of that shit is, like, also, like, dropshipping production, right? But, like, you know... There's no actual way for capital outlay costs and things like that. There's no actual way to replicate the conditions in China that make it an effective source of global production in the U.S.
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Or even in a country like India. There's just not the infrastructure there to do it. There's not the sort of migrant labor population. There's not the sort of things that you need. And what this means right now, right, is that, like, there is not a future lined up to replace the one that we're in right now.
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The economic system that existed literally at the end of last year does not exist anymore. It is right now in the process of dying. And the thing that is emerging has not emerged yet, which means we get to go to the Gramsci quote where he says this is the time of monsters. The Chinese century.
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We literally don't know what this is going to do because no one has ever bothered planning this shit out. Because this is just like taking a sledgehammer and... to fucking everything.
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Like, they are trying to extract the copper wires from the house, and in order to do this, they, like, you know, A, because they think that's how the economy works, is they extract the copper wires, and B, their plan to extract the copper wires is to blow the house up with dynamite.
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And, you know, no one's ever done an environmental impact statement on what if you blow the house up with dynamite, because why the fuck would you do that? Right. Sometimes the police do that. It's true, it's true. I guess the U.S. is the world's police force. There you go. No one has planned for this.
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But the second thing is, there isn't another model of capital waiting in the wings in the way that there was... when the sort of Reaganites did this to the economy, because the Reaganites had an entire ideological apparatus, they had a functional way for the economy to work and be worse and be more exploitative, but there's nothing behind this, right?
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There's just a vision that literally cannot work. And so the place that I want to end, as we head into the end of the economy, and as I've been trying to grapple with what is it going to look like after this, is that we just don't know. Things in the supply chain are going to break that we have never thought about before. Medical systems are going to start breaking down.
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The supply chains for really, really basic goods that we don't even think about the production process of is going to start breaking down because it relies on being able to cheaply import one very, very specific kind of product ball bearing that's made in one factory and suddenly costs like 400 times as much as it did before and we don't know what that's going to do
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And this is, on the one hand, absolutely horrifying, right? Like, this is going to mean an unbelievable amount of suffering for people across the world. But on the other hand, there is no plan, right? They don't have a fucking strategy. And that means that the future of the global economy is up in the air and it's up to us to make it a fucking better one, right?
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It's we either drive these people from power and we destroy the basis of their power on such a fundamental level they can never return to power, right? Like, we just fucking kneecap them. We physically seize all of the fucking assets and all of the things of the productive capacity that they have that has been allowing them to do this. We make sure they can never get it again.
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You know... I will point out, the reason they all called it alter-globalization and not anti-globalization was that, like, one of the original things... A lot of them did say anti-globalization. A lot of them did, right? But, like, a lot of their argument was, like... The West Coast team certainly did. This is true.
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But, like, it's also true that, like, one of the arguments they were making was that, like, neoliberal globalization meant that people couldn't move to places, but capital could. And the thing that they want was a world where people can move between things and, like, fuck capital. What the fuck? Like, eat shit, right?
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and that's a world that we can build right we we can build a world where fucking nobody gets arrested by the immigration gestapo we're like there isn't a fucking line on the ground that dictates whether people can disappear you to a concentration camp and that is also globalization right we just have to fucking do it anarcho-clintonism one day we can look at a beautiful world
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Look, if Bill Kristol could admit the radicals were right, all of these other motherfuckers could come around. We've been right all, but we've been right the whole fucking time. Fuck you assholes.
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All of you broke this world and it is now our job to put it back together. And you fuckers are going to back us or we're all going to be killed by fascism. Those are the terms. Deal with it.
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look i okay so like here's the thing i i on a fundamental level think that gromsey is like the harbinger of the entire retreat of the 20th century left so i hate him and therefore i refuse to say his name properly also we're going to get into a little bit about why the chinese century is going to also be a complete shit show for them too but you know the canadian century i don't know finally the yugoslavian century
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I'm so excited for us to finally get our first war between two countries with Tim Hortons in it. That will be exciting. So there is a story that we have told on this show many, many, many, many, many, many times. And it is the story of the structure of the modern world economy, the birth of neoliberalism, the ascendancy of free trade, the decline of the U.S.
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as the world's great manufacturing power, the collapse of the power of the global working class. And the generalized ascension of capitalism and this specific form of capitalism as a structuring force of the world system.
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It is a story of how structural forces and contingent choices, technological changes in class wars, domestic politics and grand international maneuvers and international relations built a political and economic structure that ruled the world for half a century of American hegemony. And we are going to tell a very, very abbreviated version of that story for one final time.
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The world that we were all born into. That world is fucking dead. And Donald Trump has killed it. And this is how it died. Garrison. Yes. In the beginning... There was war. Sure. In the ashes of a continent ripped by the flames of fascism, two armies stood triumphant over a new world. One of them, unfortunately, was the United States, and the second one, unfortunately, was the USSR.
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Now, it's also worth mentioning that very briefly, both the French and the British assumed they would also be like superpowers, and no. Jokes. Washed. Failed. Failed powers. Zero out of ten. Absolute dipshits.
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Well, you know, I mean, but the actual shift here, though, and this is, you know, this actually is a lot of what this episode is about, is that The thing that World War I or World War II did was, and World War I also did this, but was fundamentally break the power of the old world empires, right?
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Because the world had been ruled for several hundred years by various combinations of the French, the British, and the Germans, and, you know, to some extent, like, Spain, but Spain was sort of gone, right? But, like, those old world empires had been what had structured everything in the world, right? And at the end of World War II, that suddenly wasn't the case anymore.
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And the product of this was that if you look at the places in the world that had the largest remaining industrial reserves, right? You know, I mean, there was obviously some industrial production in Latin America, particularly Argentina. There was some like Chinese manufacturing belts that were run by Japan in China that weren't destroyed.
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And then there was the entire manufacturing power of the United States. And this meant that alone among countries, right, the U.S. was in the most dominant position, like one of the most dominant positions a great power has ever been in, even though there technically was a second great power, right? They had an unbelievable percentage of the world's total manufacturing power.
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We had an unhinged percentage of the world's total gold reserves. We had, I guess, like the second largest army in the world. But, you know, we were significantly more technologically advanced than the USSR. And this had a bunch of extremely weird consequences because there was really no way for the amount of concentrated industrial power the US had to go but down.
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Because we controlled so much of the world's wealth and so much of the world's manufacturing capacity that the only thing that could ever possibly happen was that the rest of the world would catch up. And this was a thing that was actually necessary. And this was something that was spurred on by the American industrial class, right?
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Because they suddenly had all of these, like, Jeep factories you're trying to make cars out of, and they needed people to buy the cars. And the only way to do that was to rebuild Europe and to rebuild Japan in order to sort of rebuild these places as markets. And so...
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For a very brief time, and this is the sort of golden age that all of these Trump people and all of these weird dipshits harken back to was this hard time of unmatched American power. But also, it was a time in the world economy where you could have multiple powers industrializing at the same time without it being zero-sum. And that just was not going to last.
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Because at a certain point, and this is accelerated by things we've talked about in other episodes, like this attempt by a bunch of what were called the Non-Aligned Movement, or sort of the G77, you know, also like the Third World Movement, a bunch of these countries that were non-aligned, like Yugoslavia, India...
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Pakistan, which you could you could immediately tell how this alliance is going to ship because these two countries are like are like in the same alliance. Right. Like, you know, this is the Tito's Yugoslavia is in this with like Saudi Arabia. These countries sort of like economic strategy was to create something that actually is in a lot of ways kind of like what Trump is trying to do.
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Which is, like, using their control of resources, although, again, the resource the U.S. has now is, like, money. Because they took all of the fucking world's resources, right? But using that to develop your own local industrial basis so you can have your own local manufacturing economy. And this is something that a lot of countries pursued this. Venezuela pursues this. Bolivia pursues it.
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This is something that everyone, kind of across the political spectrum, is trying to do in the 60s and 70s and through the 80s. But the thing is, it's destroyed by the second thing that's sort of a model for what these people are trying to do, which is what Reagan was able to do to the American economy in the sort of 1980s.
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And what Reagan is able to do is, Reagan actually does something that sounds really bizarre now, But he was actually successfully able to temporarily for about maybe like six years, six or seven years, was able to actually like dramatically ramp up American like like industrial production and like was able to do the whole sort of like we're bringing the jobs back to the U.S.
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But the thing is, the way he did this was not the way the Trump administration is doing it, right? What he did was, on the one hand, he blew a smoking crater in the entire world economy. And that, Garrison, will sound familiar to you because these people are trying to blow a hole in the American economy, right? You have seen this. Yes, I have seen the stonks and the trade and the shipments.
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yeah but even like like elon musk would like deliver like post about this right like very deliberately about how he wants to destroy the economy so that there could be like a oh yeah brief economic hardship and then a golden age right necessary hardship will have to endure for a short period of time to then reach the like utopia which is surely around the corner yeah and and it's interesting because when when serious people have to defend this like fox okay i say serious people i'm saying this and i'm saying fox news because like
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Yeah, I know, have to defend this, right? Like, okay, you know, we're not dealing with like, you know, we're not dealing with like intellectual titans here. But like when someone who is mildly more intelligent than Elon Musk has to defend this, it is Reagan they point to. Because Reagan, and Carter was also ahead of hand in this, but Reagan does this thing called the Volcker Shock, right?
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Like working hand in hand with Paul Volcker, who's the head of the Federal Reserve. Which, notably, Trump just spent a bunch of time threatening to fire the head of the Federal Reserve and then had to back off on that because all of the markets were like, this is our fucking Rubicon. Like, we don't give a fuck about any of the other things.
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Well, I mean, we kind of give a fuck about the other things you'd be doing. But, like, if you fire the head of the Federal Reserve, like, we're going apeshit. But like, you know, the Fed and Reagan worked together in order to do this thing, which is jack interest rates to just like unhinged levels, causing everyone else's debt in the world to become like unbelievably unsustainable to repay.
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Yeah, raise the black flag. Raise the black flag once again.
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Yeah, use your F movies, use your whatever. Yeah.
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And also very explicitly, he talks about this in an interview like the Revolutions podcast by Mike Duncan. It's somehow on how this one.
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This like annihilates most of the world's economies. This also creates like a double dip recession where the U.S. has like almost 20 percent unemployment rate. But he's able to write this out specifically because this thing actually benefits a bunch of sections of the American capitalist class. If you are someone who holds debt, this is fucking great for you.
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And this is something very different from what's happening right now because nobody is winning the trade war. Everyone is just having the very worst time they've ever had. It does seem like a globe of losers.
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Yeah, but the thing that Reagan does that actually allowed him to temporarily restore the profitability of a lot of American manufacturing, and there is still a lot of American manufacturing, we'll get to that in a bit,
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Yeah. And this is, like, the people are cutting out, like, they're cutting out, like, the Director of Imperial, of the ISB. Like, they're cutting out the Director of Imperial Intelligence. They're cutting off, like, Grand Moff Tarkin. Like, they're cutting out, like, the most important people in Star Wars have no idea.
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Like, it's not even clear to me that Vader, I mean, Vader probably knows, but, like, there's no fucking mention of him at all either.
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He's not a part of this. He's not involved in any of this shit because he's not a Death Star guy.
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But the thing he was able to do was the thing that Garrison, I was threatening at the beginning of the show, by the time I am done doing this pod, like, maybe not this podcast, but by the time I finish doing It Could Happen Here, when I, like, die on the battlefield in 15 years, everyone will be able to fucking explain the Plaza Accords and the Reverse Plaza Accords because they are the central thing that got us all to this fucking place.
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Yeah, this is something I've never actually really seen depicted in any kind of mainstream...
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media thing which is something that that happens in real movements which is that when when movements suffer serious setbacks or when you know and we see this more commonly in real life when sort of like you know the tide of a movement falls and everything starts falling apart and these are people who just got absolutely obliterated in a battle of their leaders dead a bunch of their comrades died
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One of the things that happens in this is that this is when social movements devolve into infighting. You know, and this is what was happening inside of like the American left roughly from 2021 to 2024 was you got this giant, really vicious cycle of infighting because this is what happens when there's no longer a threat to hold everyone together.
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And people have this tendency to, because they've just lost, right? Everyone's trying to process the emotions of their defeat, of like the really serious psychological damage that they've suffered like in these battles. People lash out at each other because it's easier than trying to fight an enemy that has just defeated you.
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And, you know, there's a complicating factor in this, which is that, like, you know, these are also the periods when, like, rapists tend to get ran out, right? And when, like, abusers in the scene tend to get ran out. But on the other hand, it turns into these really, really nasty sort of... Sometimes they're sectarian, sometimes they're just sort of, like...
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Yeah, and this is something that happens like every time there's a cycle. I mean, I remember this. God, like, I mean, you see this shit in scenes like from like 2013, 2014. There was like a huge cycle of this. There were kind of cycles of this in like 2019 when things were kind of falling apart by ISIS. This is just like...
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something that's a reality of social movements that you don't ever really see depicted. And the other thing I think is fascinating about it is because Andor is the person who's watching it, right? Andor has no idea what the fuck is going on with the internal dynamics of this group.
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which is that Ronald Reagan goes to Japan and goes to, like, West Germany, and the subtext of what he's saying is, like, you are American military protectorates, and because you are American military... Japan, by the way, is, like, the great industrial power of the 1980s, right, and through the 90s. Like, they are, like...
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Yeah, and because of that, you get two things at the same time that I think are both really important. One is that you get to see what this kind of infighting looks like, right? Like actually depicting television, you get to see what happens when movements fail and when people start to infight.
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And two, you get to see what it looks like from the outside, from Andor's perspective, where he's looking at these people and he's like, what the fuck is wrong with you people? All of you guys are clowns.
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Yeah, and this is also a thing that you get. This is a real movement dynamic, where it's like, you know, you're watching people who, after 2020 or something, you know, you've been through your first movement, and you're in your first movement cycle collapse, right? Yeah.
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If you've been doing this for like a fucking decade, and you're watching all of these people do this shit again, and it's just like...
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oh god fucking damn it like the kids are like you know they haven't been to this before it's really traumatic and they're doing all this like completely incomprehensible bullshit which is also like on the outside if you look into this and someone is not part of one of these scenes and you're seeing all this drama it's just like what the fuck is wrong with you people like why are you doing this and the fact that you're getting all of this like in a fucking disney show is fascinating
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the defining like they are the thing that everyone thinks about China today like if you want to find every argument people make about China from the entire political spectrum like all the way from like people on the one hand going like this is they're going to destroy American hegemony to people on the other hand being like this is what socialism is you can find all those same arguments people made about Japan in like the 80s
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Yeah, you become yourself. and this is another thing that, that was the moment in this season where I was like, Oh, okay. So the people are, it's still the same people. And it's like, these are people who are just of the left in a way that you don't really ever see. Even with like old communists who are writing stuff. It's like, I have given this speech to people like dozens and dozens of times.
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Like, this is a thing that if you do this work, like you have literally given this speech to a new person about like, yeah, like this is the reason why. And like, it's just,
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But, you know, what Reagan forces these countries to do is to increase the value of their currency relative to the dollar. Right. So the dollar is suddenly worth less. And because the dollar is like worth less relative to other international currencies, it makes U.S. manufacturing more competitive. And this like temporarily restores American technological production.
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But then they have to reverse them because that nukes the entire Japanese economy and the Japanese economy becomes an entire thing of real estate speculation. Right. Which, you know, I know you may be too young to remember what happened the last time that we based the entire economy on real estate speculation, but it didn't go great.
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Yeah, one of the things that isn't really being talked about with this show, but I think is very important, is that it is absolutely unflinching in its depiction of patriarchy. Like, I mean, there's the sort of obvious horrifying scene of, like, this ice guy, I mean, increasingly over the course of this thing, like, just...
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Going from like, hey, if you like date me, you can not get deported because we have to maintain. I know you're illegal. And that's fine.
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Yeah, and then, you know, and it just escalates from there and it's just straight up like sexual assault, right? And this is really, really, I mean, obviously it's jarring because it's, you know, like it's an on-screen depiction of an attempted sexual assault and then she like does a fight and she kills him, right?
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But this was also very, very jarring to a lot of people because people are very, and this is a Star Wars thing too, they are very used to seeing fascism depicted through its own self-perception, right? People are very, very used to seeing fascism as something that is strong, that is ordered, that is disciplined, that is dangerous.
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The problem is, the reality of fascism is that a lot of it is just a bunch of dipshit rapists who are pretending to be those guys.
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And, you know, and this is one of the things Andor's always been very, very good at is you saw this last season, right? With, with Dedra, who is, her thing is that she is, you know, the very common American archetype of the cop who breaks all the rules to get the job done. And then, you know, and then like that, that's how she first is first introduced.
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And then you see what that actually looks like in public, which is, you know, she is just straight up torturing Bix with like the screams of an entire, the death scream of an entire species. Yeah. That's in season one. Yeah, yeah, that's in season one.
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And what's powerful about this is something Andor also does in the Prison Break episodes is like this fascist self-perception, right, of this sort of strong, ordered, disciplined, unified thing, that is just propaganda. They are not actually like that behind the scenes, right? It's just these fucking incredibly violent, like, petty losers doing this fucking shit, right?
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And then, you know, the other thing about the sort of patriarchy side is that you see this on the other side with Mon Mothma's, like, you know, her sort of, like, money cleaner, who's what her old friend take home and, like, literally is demanding that, like, Mon Mothma have sex with him in order for him to keep doing this money-washing shit. Yeah.
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And this is also something you see in movements all the time, which is, like, guys with resources using their access to resources to force themselves on women, like, in the movement.
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And this... And, you know, and there's, like, a third dynamic here with take-home, which is, like, another thing you see all the time in movements is guy going through a divorce who goes completely off the fucking rails and starts doing shit that dangers everyone and, you know, starts doing sort of, like, weird predatory shit. And I think...
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I don't know, there just hasn't been much analysis of, like, yeah, these are all ways, things that, like, if you have been in movements, you have experienced patriarchy in all of these ways. You have experienced cops doing shit to you. You have experienced stuff from inside the movement.
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Yeah. And, you know, and you have that on one hand. On the other hand, with like the cops, this is like a very, very common like cops just like sexually assaulting people for fun. It's like a thing that they do all the fucking time. And same thing with ICE, because I mean, this is obviously like. I don't think you said it directly. This is just literally one-to-one.
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And the heroes are the people who, like, and or coming back with a TIE fighter blowing them up. Right. Like, you know, Yeah, also, I do want to, on a somewhat later note, I do want to point out that, like, this show also quietly has had, like, the most realistic lesbian relationship in all of Star Wars. Yes, it does.
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And this season, it's like, oh, someone on this crew is a lesbian because they have depicted my culture perfectly, which is, you know, okay, so, like, the rich girl lesbian and the, like, broke non-white lesbian.
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Like, guerrilla lesbian who came from nothing, whose family was killed by the Empire, get together as an intense item, dream an operation, and then the moment the operation is over, their broke girl was like, fuck, this was a bad idea, and now they keep running into each other in movement things that are like, they're sort of avoiding each other, and one of them is still... Perfect depiction of lesbian culture.
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Incredible. No notes. Love the lesbian rebels. I'm happy for them. Ah, incredible.
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thing i want to close on was with this wedding which is there's a bunch of really fascinating things about it one is that okay so on the very non-subtle level like they are cutting back and forth between everyone dancing to this like sort of tech upbeat techno thing like they're cutting back and forth between like mon mothma dancing at this wedding and like the ice raid that's happening
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All right, while Garrison checks to be a long docs file, the economy that is built up from all of this, though, right, is an economy based on a few different things. One, it's based on an entire network of global supply chains with, you know, like, very, very minimal tariff barriers between them, right? It is based on the sort of doctrine of free trade, which is, you know, not really free, but...
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Which is like, you know, this is the level of political subtlety that you need to be working on with the American people. You have to just be like, I'm hammering you over the head with the point, which is like all of you motherfuckers are going to brunch and like the ICE raids are happening.
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And there's this fascinating thing. I noticed this especially watching back season one. If you go back and watch those scenes and you look at the way it's lit, you look at the way that there's just this stark white light coming through the windows. This is not how it's lit in season one, right? This is a very deliberate choice.
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Almost everyone else who does this scene would do this sort of warm, rich, golden lighting because that's how you do these sort of fancy wedding things. And this, the way that it is lit is the same way that they're lighting all of the, like, the stark white imperial corridors. And there's this very, you know, it's working on, like, all of these sort of, like,
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levels of visual metaphor of all of this, just like, oh yeah, this is also imperial space, right? And everyone here is operating either, regardless of what side they're on, they're operating in imperial terrain, in this sort of thing, as Asma Motha also was just dealing with her kid becoming a trad cath, and trying to talk her kid out of being a trad cath, and her kid...
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fucking loses her shit at her for being like hey maybe you shouldn't do this like weird marriage thing when you're like a child like 12 year old marriage yeah yeah I think I think a place I want to end on is there was a really interesting thing where like the Disney account like, just posted a video, like, I think it was on Twitter, that was just one, like, one hour of Mothma dancing. Yeah.
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And there was, like, a fascinating reaction to this of, like, like, because on the one hand, there's, like, all these people, like, who I know, Victoria Zeller, who's a trans writer who I follow, who I'll probably be talking to on the show at some point soon, had this thing about, like, oh, yeah, like, there are also, there's just going to be weddings that are, like, based on this Shangri-La wedding thing in, like, two or three years we're going to be seeing this.
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Yeah. And there's this interesting dynamic where, like, on the one hand, you have the people who are just completely focused on the aesthetic.
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Obviously, the ways that these were written structurally benefited the U.S. The U.S. is allowed to do all of this shit for its corn production that no other country is allowed to do. All of the market tampering that all these people scream about is just what the U.S. does with corn.
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And then on the other hand, you have the people who are like, oh, yeah, I, like, this is fucking me getting just absolutely fucked up as, like, all of the fucking horrors play out around us and having to, like, deal with and fight all the fucking horrors while, like, all of the people around me are just, like... kind of just completely checked out.
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And I thought it was just like fascinating watching that sort of play out on social media and on like in real life, like this, you know, they're being very, very literal about how it works and it's working. I'm seeing people do it.
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But, you know, the entire economic system was based on being able to cheaply produce different components of goods in different countries, assemble them, and then move them across the world cheaply in order to sort of avoid the localized power of workers' movements. It is based on the U.S.
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We're in this kind of crisis period of, I don't know, what you call the national trans movement to the extent that it exists, where the advocacy orgs and legal strategies they've been pursuing are not working. We're losing in the courts all the time. Their electoral strategy of... kind of burying themselves in the Biden administration has failed.
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And I think this is a moment where we need a new plan. And this is as good of a plan as I've ever seen. And I think one of the things that we're going to see, we're going to need to see, and we're literally just going to have to do over the next few years. I mean, ideally, over the next couple of months, because we don't have much time until these people take power.
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is more sort of, you know, not just intra-union coordination of organizing trans workers, but is organizing trans workers across different unions and trying to figure out how we leverage our power more broadly to protect ourselves and to fight for our rights and fight to be free.
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We have an opportunity here because, you know, to do a version of Zizek's mistranslation of Antonio Gramsci is like, you know, the old trans movement is dying and the new world struggles to be born. Now is a time of monsters. But I think this means that, you know, you, like literally the people listening to the show, the people on this now, we are going to be the people who define humanity.
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what the trans movement is going to be going forward, right? And we have to because we have no other choice. But this also means that, yeah, we are going to be the ones who get to set the tone of what we're doing, get to strategically decide on how we're going to do this. And I think we have advantages, too, in the sense that
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There are ways in which our economic marginalization is sort of helpful in that, you know, if you look at the sort of independent unions that have been forming recently, right? Even more so than in conventional unions, unbelievable numbers of those people are trans, right? Because... you know, okay, you're dealing with a population where it's very easy to get salt.
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It's very easy to send people into unionized stores because no one has jobs anyways. And so the, you know, the risk of you losing it is like lower because you're already taking a low wage job, et cetera, et cetera. And I think there's things about these movements and the way that we're embedding ourselves in also sort of new movements, like the Starbucks unionization thing is not that old, right?
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I think we're well-positioned on the sort of front of a bunch of different changes that are happening in both union organizing and in how the American working class works to build something together that can actually go back on the offensive for the first time in like a decade.
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Every single union that has ever been formed was made by people exactly like you. You, the listener, listening to this right now, right? You are exactly the person who has organized every union that anyone has ever done, right? It's not something that's like the domain of pure professional organizers. You can do this too.
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Jesus Christ. Yeah, I mean, if you are in a union and you hear your leadership say the words historic contract, you are screwed. That agreement is going to suck. I remember on this show, literally live and recording right before there's supposed to be the Teamsters UPS strike, right?
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Like I'm literally on the episode with two of the union people and we get the text of the contract in the middle of recording and And we get the thing with it is this is a historic contract. And we're like reading in the middle of the episode. It's like, wait, this fucking sucks shit. It's like, that's how you know you are doomed.
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When you get the historic, when they start pulling out the historic contract thing.
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Yeah, but by the time we're finished recording this, there might be another anti-trans executive order. We'll get to that at the end. But the big ones for right now is that Trump is trying to do a... And this is something we talked about in our last episode about what it's going to look like for trans people, but a federal funding...
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ban for trans health care which means for for youth trans health care which means any provider that like gets federal funding and this is this includes things like taking medicare and medicaid right those like hospitals can't do any kind of gender affirming care for youth Part of what's sort of terrifying, I mean, there's a lot of terrible stuff about this, but they've defined a kid as age 19.
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Or under the age of 19. Yeah, under the age of 19.
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Totally, totally. Yeah, and on that note, one of the things they're trying to do is target states that have trans-sanctuary laws by trying to get parents who take their kids to safe states charged on kidnapping charges.
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And it's worth noting, supposedly later today, there's going to be one about using the attorney general's office to work with attorney generals in states who prosecute teachers to use gender affirming pronouns as like sexual abusers.
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And I want to point out like these executive orders specifically, like the second raft of them that I've been talking about, like these are all unbelievably illegal, right? Yeah. Like. These are probably not going to get implemented immediately because there's immediately going to go to the courts like the Supreme Court will probably give them some of it.
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But like you can't just like declare something a crime and have the attorney general prosecute people for it. Like that specific thing is genuinely so ridiculous that it might not survive the Supreme Court. It's nonsense. But things that aren't nonsense. And this is something he genuinely can do. That's very dangerous is he's trying to get. And this is from Aaron Reed.
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He's a trans journalist, does pretty good work on this stuff. The federal government has been instructed to not follow WPATH guidelines. So WPATH is this sort of organization that sets the guidelines for like trans health care. And this we don't know what this is going to do.
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There is a chance that this could endanger private like health care covering it because they follow the government using WPATH guidelines. So that's extremely, extremely bad. But again, and this is going to be a running theme in the next section of this, a lot of this is stuff that he should need Congress for, and he's just trying to do it because he thinks that he can and he doesn't give a shit.
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So speaking of fuck it, let's get into this whole, this whole freezing the entire federal government thing. We're going to do a more detailed episode about this next week, but maybe the most unhinged thing that he's done so far is in the birthright stuff. he did an executive order that's telling everyone they can't fund DEI. Yeah. Early this week, the U.S.
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Office of Personnel Management sent out this memo to everyone telling them that, like, all grant programs are frozen until they submit a, like, they submit a description of, like, what the grant program is and why it's not DEI. And so, like, Things that were, like, fucked by this, right? I have a few of these programs that they were, the grants they were shutting down here.
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The Nicholas and Zachary Burt Memorial Carbon Monoxide Poisoning Program. Whoa! The National School Lunch Program, Special Milk Program for Children, the Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children, the DOD's Basic and Applied Scientific Research Grants. DEI, DEI. It's even got a D right in there. That's right.
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One of these, and this is a very serious one, at least for these people holding on to power, was the National Guard's military operation and maintenance. Famously woke. That's like $8 billion of money to the National Guard. Hey, critical support. He got one thing right.
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The way that you can tell that none of these people and the thing is a sign of is that none of these people have any idea what's going on inside of the state. They don't understand what it is. They don't understand what it does.
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And I can prove this for a fact because one of the programs that they froze was a program that gives money to police to do patrols outside of a nuclear weapons assembly plant. They defunded the nuke police.
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So, this is the thing. Like, I think people have this conception that, like, you know, they're operating according to a plan. These are all sort of strategic, like, strokes and master strokes. And, like, no. They're just lashing out, right? They're driven by pure anger, and they're trying to do this purge of the government of anything woke or whatever.
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Like, anything that's, like, vaguely involves non-white people or just, like, anyone who's not a cis white dude, they're trying to get rid of. Yeah. And this memo is... Was immediately challenged in court because it's also this is also hideously illegal. The president doesn't control the purse strings. That's like, you know, in the Constitution, it says that Congress controls this.
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So where we're at now is that the memo has been withdrawn. But there's a bunch of really conflicting information where, like, Trump spokespeople are saying that they're still going to go through with the executive orders.
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But the problem that they have is that there are literally so many of these grants. And the reason they did it this way in the first place was because they found a list of grants, they copied all of them, and they were like, okay, departments, you have to go figure this out and we're freezing your stuff until you do that. Even Medicaid was frozen for a few hours yesterday. Yeah, right.
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Jesus Christ. So you gave up things for a 1.3% raise. That's the kind of thing that you get if like... I don't know, say, like, you got, like, some unbelievable concession package somewhere else. Maybe, conceivably, you would take that. Or maybe it's a thing where, like, you're, like, a nurse and your problem isn't pay. Your problem is you're working, like, two million hours a week.
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But, like, that's a you-got-concession-somewhere-else kind of thing, not a we-gave-up stuff for, like, the worst raise you've ever seen.
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Great. Incredible stuff. Yeah, it's it's it's wild. Someone should dig into who's running that company and, like, who they're working with to get those contracts because probably a fun story there.
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Oh, great. Okay, yeah. I'm bequeathing this as a gift. I know there's a bunch of journalists who listen to this. Go do that story. I guarantee you'll find some unbelievably unhinged stuff.
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Yeah. And like it's Minnesota, right? Like I'm from Chicago. So like it is it is slightly warmer in Chicago and you get wind chills and negative 40 here. And like Minnesota is much worse. So like that is that that is not like optional stuff. That is the difference between you having hypothermia and you not having hypothermia.
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Yeah, speaking of ways to not die in Minnesota summers, here are some products and services that will probably not help you with that, but maybe they will. We are back.
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Great. Great. Your managers are also cops. They can attack you. Incredible. Incredible stuff from the post office.
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And in every single one of these contracts, they're inventing new, different, and unique ways to do wage theft and just steal people's money, which... And it's worth noting, again, like if a post carrier like broke into an office and stole the amount of money that is being stolen from them, they would go to prison forever. Right.
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But because it's your boss doing this, like the worst thing that happens to them is they have to go through a grievance procedure, even though they are just literally robbing you.
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Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and putting them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. So, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, we talked about the collapse of the U.S. Postal Service and the absolute horror show that's been inflicted on postal workers. When we last left our intrepid heroes, things were not great. They have continued to be not great.
Behind the Bastards
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Yes, this is this is this is a vote to send your bargaining reps back to the table with the demand that we can't take a deal that sucks this much. That's what a vote no thing is.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, like, 1.3% is the kind of raise that, like, in a normal functioning union is, like, that's, like, a company's opening agreement that both you and the company knows you're not going to take. Yeah. Like, that's...
Behind the Bastards
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And with us to talk about this entire shit show... is Bad Mouth, who's a letter carrier in Fort Worth, and Tommy Espinoza, who is a former letter carrier and former union steward for the Post Office Union. That one. Yeah, look, it's like I got up at 7 a.m. this morning. It's happened that long since I got up. You're getting tired, Mia.
Behind the Bastards
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The products and services that support this podcast if you don't buy them and therefore cannot be are broken. Is there anything else you want to talk about with arbitration or should we move on to the impending doom of the postal service?
Behind the Bastards
It Could Happen Here Weekly 167
Yeah, so let's move on to the future of the post office, which I want to take a second to mention that, like, Okay, look, I am not someone who has any respect for the people who built the U.S. government. However, if you want the U.S. government to exist, the Postal Service is something that was deemed so important that establishing the Postal Service is in the main body of the Constitution.
Behind the Bastards
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Now, freedom of speech and the right to free association, that is not in the main body of the Constitution. That is a fucking amendment. Right. The people who built the American system thought that the Postal Service was a more important thing to make sure to have in the main body of the Constitution that set up the modern version of the government. Right.
Behind the Bastards
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They thought that shit was more important than like your right to have freedom of assembly, like your right to not literally be grabbed off the street and tortured, which is like the Fourth Amendment. Right. So like, you know, in the scale of priorities of like how important is the Postal Service? Like that's how important people who set it up.
Behind the Bastards
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thought it was, and those people were not very smart and, like, a bunch of racist slave owners, so I would argue it's actually more important than they thought it was because they're, you know, I mean, like, obviously their priorities are completely out of whack, but, like...
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, no, he did. He did own a slave as a young man. Damn it. And I think freed him.
Behind the Bastards
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We're finding this out live. So, yeah, he did for his early life and then became an abolitionist later. Which is still bad. Yeah, yeah. That's, you know, glad you came around eventually, I guess. I don't know. Look, we're finding this out live on the show. Oh, my God. That was a lot of time of him owning slaves. That absolutely sucks shit.
Behind the Bastards
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But both of you two, welcome to the show, and I'm excited to talk to you both.
Behind the Bastards
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Well, and, like, also, I want to point out, the President of the United States is issuing a cryptocurrency. Like, that shit is so fake now. Like, so fake.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, so, all right, let's start in a place where many things start, which is to say the 1970s, the fulcrum upon which history pivoted. So one of the things, and we talked about this in our last episode, is that post office workers are not legally allowed to go on strike. This is sort of nonsense, but it also doesn't mean that it's never happened, right?
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. So it's like they can just be like they can just be like hiding like your bills or like Social Security check. Yeah. Yeah.
Behind the Bastards
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Oh, by the way, I was just about to talk about a wildcat strike. Disclaimers. No one here represents a union. They're speaking in their individual capacity, et cetera, et cetera. None of this is legal advice. Do I have any more caveats that we usually say for these things? That's roughly all of them.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, sorry. This is one of these areas where delivering the mail is a social thing, but the thing is, sociality is the enemy of capital, and that's the people who are running the post office, that they don't give a shit about you know, like the actual social bonds and ties that, you know, that are the thing that society is supposed to be composed of.
Behind the Bastards
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Like they care about their metrics and them being able to make more money and them, you know, being able to advance higher in their career ladder. Yes. It reminds me a lot of the campaign against the school system where you deliberately underfund things and then you blame the teachers for why the service is bad.
Behind the Bastards
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And it's like, well, it is not the teacher's fault that there's like 48 kids in a classroom, right? Like, yeah. And there's also a very, very similar privatization campaign run by a bunch of extremely powerful forces. Let's go back and talk a bit about who the people are who are doing this and what their sort of plans are.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, but did you want to talk about sort of the last time that things kind of looked like this and what happened?
Behind the Bastards
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that's so unhinged that's like i need to stop here for a second because that's like if your union is doing that to you you need to understand like dear listener that is not how any of this shit is supposed to work like even even a normal corrupt union will have a bargaining team that is composed of like it will have a bargaining team that isn't outside contractors there'll be people from inside the union who are like the stooges of like whatever sort of management clique is in power like having them all be outside contractors is one of the most ludicrous things i've
Behind the Bastards
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ever heard a union negotiation cutting out the entire, that's so wild.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, can you talk about what open bargaining is?
Behind the Bastards
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We'll have links to all that in the description.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, it really does. Yeah. Is there anything else that you want to make sure people know before we head off?
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah. And so as we sort of mentioned before, one of the things about the post office, it's similar. If people remember the rail, like the rail strike that didn't happen, where there's all of these hoops you have to jump, you'd be able to go on strike. And that's because, again, like rail workers, postal workers don't operate under the normal sort of National Labor Relations Board like framework.
Behind the Bastards
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Right now, admittedly, there was a very good chance that in like seven months we don't even have that. No one has that anymore. But, you know, as we are right now, yeah, things are going good. But as things are going right now, let's get into the current tentative agreement. And I guess we should actually, we should roll this back a little tiny bit.
Behind the Bastards
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For people who haven't listened to these episodes before, can you explain what a tentative agreement is?
Behind the Bastards
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And that's had a profound impact on most of the unions that survived that period. And a lot of them didn't, right? Which is, you know, part of why you get people who behave like this. But on the downside is it means that you get handed a lot of deals that absolutely suck. But do you know what else absolutely sucks? It's the robotics and services that support this podcast. They probably don't.
Behind the Bastards
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I don't know. We are back. So let's talk about what the tentative agreements that y'all are being asked to sign is right now.
Behind the Bastards
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This is one of the things that the UAW is fighting for, is eliminating tiering systems altogether. Because if you're actually trying to get a functional union and make people's jobs better, that's the thing that you do. And having a third tier is not good. Extremely bad.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, morale is a terrain of struggle. And this is a way that you can fight there that does other things too at the same time, which is critically important.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you because things have been very bad. And one of the specific ways that they've been very bad is that there's become this framing, and this has been around for a while, but it's getting sort of increasingly adopted in mainstream circles, that trans rights are opposed to workers' rights. And that's just nonsense.
Behind the Bastards
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So I wanted to sort of start there with a bit of a discussion about the ways in which the trans struggle is a workers' struggle.
Behind the Bastards
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Yeah, the actual stats, by the way, these are running from the U.S. Trans Survey, which is the largest survey of trans people in the U.S. 34% poverty rate. The national number for cis people is 11%. The unemployment rate is 18%. The U.S. unemployment rate for cis people is 4%. 18% is 1936 rate depression levels of unemployment. 30% of trans people have experienced homelessness in their lives.
Behind the Bastards
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The national rate is about 7%. And those numbers are actually very misleading because it's actually much worse than that because these demographics skew young significantly because of both the shortness of our life expectancy and how often we get killed and also... There's more people who are realizing that they're trans now than there ever has before.
Behind the Bastards
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So those homelessness numbers, we are racking up a rate of homelessness that is four times higher than the regular rate. And we're doing it in significantly less years than it takes the cis population to rack up these levels of homelessness. So things are extremely bad for trans people. Trans femmes make like 60 cents on the dollar of like the average American worker.
Behind the Bastards
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That's something I also want to highlight because I don't think people understand this at all if they're cis is that the level of employment discrimination is staggering. It is however hard if you are a cis person you think it is to find a job. It is like 30 times harder if you are trans.
Behind the Bastards
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It's unbelievably difficult and the promise of just like any job that will hire a trans person is a huge deal because you know, otherwise odds are you walk in the door and they take one look at you and like, you know, you're fucked.